DOSBox
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
7recommend
1warn against
Nov 14, 2025first mention
Oct 21, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I don't think you can get much better than the synth in DOSBOX”
Doom composer Bobby Prince (quoted email)on “Bobby Prince, composer for Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and…”
Show 3 more
“I got it up and running in dos box - it still runs smooth as butter”
“I used dosbox to install Windows 3.1”
“DOSBox in particular allows adding widgets to control things”
Caveats and dissent
“vanilla DOSBox isn't able to run the game”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs 3 mentions
- Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990 2 mentions
- Building a TUI is easy now 2 mentions
- Why Windows 11 still ships with Windows 95's memory manager hidden inside it 1 mention
- QBasic in the Browser 1 mention
- Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it? 1 mention
Data: dosbox.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 30
“it contains DosBox”
“I checked it against thousands of real programs running in DOSBox”
“the Step5 software came in a special DosBox version with it.”
“or a modified DOSBox to determine all code/data blocks”
“I'm a big fan of DOSBox.”
“what's the advantage of this vs just playing in DOSBox?”
“with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running”
“I don't think you can get much better than the synth in DOSBOX”
“Considering putting a small launcher together with some images of different games in doxbox for him to play.”
“I seriously wonder how many APICs are exposed in the DOSBOX code even”
“You can try it out in DOSBox here”
its back https://github.com/Solid7s/Boxer-Plus
“vanilla DOSBox isn't able to run the game”
“the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one”
“I got it up and running in dos box - it still runs smooth as butter”
“easy enough to run via dos-box”
“I used dosbox to install Windows 3.1”
“compiling and running (in DOSBox)”
“seems to work for me in dosbox”
“DOSBox's TrueType fonts threw me off. It looks great of course”
“I found it much easier to work with than DosBox's debugger”
OpenXcom adds a whole heap of wonderful conveniences to UFO/X-Com. It's probably my favourite open source game engine clone thing. https://openxcom.org/
“DOSBox in particular allows adding widgets to control things”
“(well, DOSBox)”
“with DOSBox for browsers”
“DOSBox is a great virtual machine”
As I’ve already said in my initial comment, this is not the whole story. (I acknowledge it is the official story, but I want to say the official story, at best, creatively omits some of the facts.) NTVDM as it existed Windows NT (3.1 through 10) for i386 leveraged V86 mode. NTVDM on Windows NT (e.g. 4.0) for MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha, on the other hand, already had[1] a 16-bit x86 emulator, which was merely ifdefed ou
“It seems Bard's Tale 3 can be played on the DosBox emulator:”
Age of Wonders 1 used to work. That patch that you need to get it running on Win10+ was originally made for Wine: https://aow.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=st&fn=1&tn=4694 Is that not sufficient these days? I might take another look; this is one of those games that I intend to keep running one way or another until I die.
“possibly DOSBox or QEMU+FreeDOS for the user interface to be less distracting”