As a kid, I played plenty of old DOS games. Deus Ex. Duke Nukem. Commander Keen. Remember those? (You should — two of them are getting next-gen updates this year.)
But as an adult, who’s converted to a far more useful and modern Mac, I assumed that those great old games were in my past, never to be recovered. And boy, was I wrong.
A must-have new Mac OS X app called Boxer emulates a DOS PC on your Mac, so you can pop those old CD-ROMs in and play them like new. (You can also download DOS games from sites like this one or this one.) And unlike other emulation software, Boxer handles all of the mind-numbing settings for you, like DOS prompt commands, speed settings, and so on, so all you have to do is start up the game and play. You can even set it to install games (even CD-ROMs) inside a Boxer wrapper so you can launch them from Finder just like any Mac app. Or, you can use the built-in Library shelves (seen above), that looks like Apple’s iBooks software, to catalog your DOS games.
It’s robust, it’s crazy easy, and best of all: it’s free. Why are you still reading this? Go download it now.
