I’d been tempted to muck around with replaying some old DOS games for a long time, but I’ve been so busy that I kept putting it off until a few days ago when I dug out DreamForge Infotainment and New World Computing’s ancient classic Anvil of Dawn to see if it would still work. Of course, even on Windows XP (Vista, 7 and 8 are quite awful for my classic gaming needs), thanks to some automatic upgrades, the old disc will install, but not run properly (no sound and a major error in that no onscreen text pops up in dialog boxes, meaning it’s impossible to talk to NPCs, making the game unplayable because you can enter, but not exit conversations). Anyway, I’ve used DOSBOX and one or two other programs in the past, but not on my laptop, so it was time to give it go…

Actually, I ended up going with D-Fend Reloaded, which has DOSBOX in the download and adds a ton of other cool functions. If you’ve used this already, then you know how awesome it is for those ancient games. Me, it’s my first go at it, as you can tell from the crappy movie quality above and below. Yeah, yeah – I really need to fiddle with settings and get it so that the game can run a LOT more smoothly when being recorded, but I’m just happy to be able to replay this as it should be played and not have to play some abandonware version that missing the intro and sounds.

Hmmm… now I’m thinking about going through the library here and having a bit of a D-Fend Festival, but I’ll have to put that particular party off for a while, as I already have too much on my plate. Still, it’s nice to know that I can probably go through the stacks here and come up with stuff I haven’t played in a while that’s going to work (and probably better than it did the first time around). Hmmm.. now I need to find my copy of Daggerfall or CyClones and maybe see if I can get MissionForce Cyberstorm going at 1440 x 900 or even the original Tomb Raider alive and kicking at that resolution… decisions, decisions…