Every now and then you feel the need to revisit a game from the past. When it comes to DOS based games it can be difficult for them to cope with you Quad Core Extreme powered 4 gig of RAM monster seing as they ran on harrdware your washign machine laughs at. Fortunately it is quite easy to get them going again using the right tools and the totally FREE downloads available for these old games.

Being a big fan of Eve-Online I am more than conscious of the debt it owes to Elite, so we will use that as our example. I'm going to skip the wireframe original and get the more familiar Frontier (Elite II) running; a game that I spend many a happy hour playing on my Amiga not PC!

"Frontier" also set a number of firsts in it's day. It was the first game to have real-sized planets, where cities could be viewed from orbit, it was the first to use curved surfaces (bezier), the only game to do a palette-fit every frame to get best use of colours (Amiga and ST only), and (apart from First Encounters) is the only piece of software (games or otherwise) that attempts to simulate our entire galaxy. Disregarding all of that, it was top fun to boot.

What we need first is the current version of DosBox (version 0.72 at time of writing) so go download a copy. The site has a list of all the games that work and an active forum, so you should be able to resurrect anything you fancy. It's a small download, so grab it and install.

Next you'll need the game files which, for Frontier, can be legally obtained at this site. Again, only a couple of MB, and you can even get the manual, which is nice and more importantly, will stop you trying to guess which key does what...

I extracted the game to C:\program files\games\firstenc being a bit of a neatness fiend.

So now you run Dosbox and type mount c "c:\program files\games\firstenc" and press return so that the programme can be found and then type C: then return to change directory to the games location from above. You can confirm that you have got this right by typing dir return. As you can see below I missed the first C from the mount command ;)

In the days of old you used to have to setup your soundcard before playing, so type Setup & hit return. I selected the venerable Sounblaster of my youth and tested it:

Now for the moment of truth, type firstenc and hit return.

Well worth a poke through the manual before you start your pilots career, there's no Aurora to help, unlike Eve-Online.

As you can see, not exactly difficult to get going, and you can have fun from a time when gameplay was everything. Take your time to have a look through the list at the DosBox website of the hundreds of old gems out there waiting for you to re-discover.