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If you were a computer user in the 80s and early 90s, chances are good that you used DOS or MS-DOS quite extensively. My first computer was a 286 hand me down, that at the time, was already outdated. It was a great starter rig anyway, as it gave me lots of DOS practice. I definitely learned the hard way. Imagine accidentally formatting the hard drive instead of the floppy disk. Yes, I admit it. In my defense, I was only eight years old.

Personal experiences aside, DOS was a clunky platform to code for, but the games were plenty. I personally grew up playing a lot of games from Apogee (now 3D Realms) such as Commander Keen, Bio Menace and of course, Duke Nukem. Despite the fact that these were still relatively early days of gaming, there was a huge selection to choose from.

DOSBox is a popular DOS emulator for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It perfectly mimics a DOS environment, allowing you to use a computer as you would "back in the day". That said, you are not limited to just playing games, but loading up old applications for nostalgias sake as well.

Once opened, you will have a general DOS environment with a few simple commands in the root directory, such as config.com, autoexec.bat, command.com and others. In order to access other parts of your computer, you need to mount them: mount c /home/rwilliams/dosgames/. That will allow you to access that directory as your C:\ drive. You can then navigate and install your games just as you would in DOS.

Many DOS games have configuration tools you can use. Selecting Sound Blaster or something similar in any of them should give you perfect sound.

If you know how to use DOS, you will be good to go. You can go to a full screen view with CTRL + Enter and play games as they are meant to be played.

I love DOSBox. It works extremely well and has been problem-free. It's a great program to use in order to relive the old days and play games that you haven't touched in years. If you, like me, enjoyed Apogee games, you can still download the shareware versions here. Why they can't see it in their hearts to offer full versions of 15 year old games for free, I have no idea.

I had high hopes for a Saturn emulator because it's one of the best consoles that Sega has released. The game selection was great, especially if you were a fan of imports. Radiant Silvergun or Soukyugurentai anyone? Yabause is the only Sega Saturn emulator for Linux, and I was hoping to have a similar experience as I had with the PSX emulator. That was not the case, at all.

Although many of the games I had worked, they didn't work well. In the shots above, you can see that the Nights Into Dreams title screen was displayed properly, but once I was in the game, the video was so incredibly messed up, that it was virtually unplayable. It had a serious rainbow, trance-like effect. In the right screenshot you can see Virtua Cop, which happened to be within the 10% of the time where you could actually see what was happening. Needless to say, support for games in Yabause are low. So low, it's to the point of not being worth a try.

I did manage to run Daytona USA however, but still had some random graphic glitches. It was fully playable and ran well. Out of the 7 or 8 games I tried, it was the only one to work reliably. If you insist on trying it out anyway, you can check out the compatibility portion of the official site. While support is still a little iffy, Yabause is still in development, albeit a slow one. I truly hope to see a version that has wider compatibilities in the future.

BoycottAdvance is a free/legal/portable emulator for the Gameboy Advance handheld by Nintendo. allows you to play free/public domain demo's and games as well as (some) commercial games which are available for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance handheld.

Released as beer-ware.

License: free

Additional System Requirements:

First initial release of SDL port based upon the Windows version of Cygne (http://cygne.emuunlim.com). Released under LGPL complete with source and Public Domain game WonderSnake.

License: free

Additional System Requirements: SDL 1.2.3 and ZLIB 1.1.3 or higher

An emulator which lets you play the arcade versions of many laserdisc games on your PC, with or without a laserdisc reader attached to your PC.

License: free

Additional System Requirements:

• SDL
• Laserdisc's of the original games, or MPEG streams of the games.
• A hardware accelerated implementation of the Xv (X Video) extension is highly recommended.