Month of DOS

As mcfar54 has said, this month is the month of DOS, dedicated to those old DOS Games.

- INTRODUCTION -

Now, for those who don't know what DOS is, DOS stands for Disc Operating System. DOS is an operating system used for the IBM PC computers around 1981 to 1995 and has been partly used for the Microsoft Windows 95,98 and Millennium Edition (ME).
DOS uses command line interfacing, meaning that programs are started by entering their filename and file path. Also there are internal commands such as copying a file.

DOS isn't that user friendly as it does not have any graphical interface such as buttons or icons for menus or navigation, meaning that it would be very hard for a new person to use it, though you don't really need to know how to use it to play DOS games.

An example of what DOS looks like

Seeing as Windows 95,98 and ME computers nowadays are very old, ugly, bulky and not so powerful relative to the new XP and Vista computers, nobody really wants to go out to buy one to try to play DOS games. But Windows XP computers can play very few DOS games very well. If you manage to find a DOS game that runs on XP, it would either be very jerky (Eg. Doom II), or have no sound (Eg. Dune II) or the copmuter is too powerful to play the game and you can't really play it because it runs really really really fast so that it is unplayable (Eg. Warcraft II).

So, if you want to play DOS games, there is a way to be able to play DOS games on a Windows XP computer properly with no problems. A free program called DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com/) can be used to play DOS games. The program maybe difficult to use at first, but there is a good tutorial on how to set it up and use it here. When you have got the hang of using DOSBox you can now go play your DOS games on your Windows XP computer to your heart's content.
If you don't own any DOS games, don't worry as some of DOS games are available to be downloaded for free legally.

Anyway, that's it for now and I will be reviewing DOS games for the next few weeks.