Hi and welcome to a new post here on the Gaming on AmigaOS 4 blog! Many thanks for visiting. 🙂

Today we’re going to have a look at gaming through emulation on AmigaOS 4.1. There are plenty of emulators available for a wide range of platforms on this operating system, but in this post we will focus on emulating classic PC DOS games with DOSBox.

The developer kas1e has recently released several updates to the AmigaOS 4 port of DOSBox, the last one yesterday on the 24th of February. I actually use a version a few days older, as I haven’t installed the newest one yet. He is for sure doing a great job with this port of the emulator.

As far as I can see from the text on OS4Depot, DOSBox (the latest version) requires AmigaOS 4.1 as a minimum. I have tested the program on a SAM460 with AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition with 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon HD graphics card.

All photos in this post has been taken with a mobile phone.

Installation

As mentioned above, DOSBox is available for free from OS4Depot. You can click on the link below to download it directly:

http://os4depot.net/share/emulation/computer/dosbox.lha

You can also visit the page here:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/computer/dosbox.lha

The installation is pretty straight forward. After the file has been downloaded, access its directory and right-click on the icon and select “extract to”. Then select a destination drawer and unpack. When this is done, head over to it and double-click on the icon to launch the emulator.

Most of what you need is already set up, so you can actually start using it more or less right away without doing much configuring. The only thing you need to do is to mount a virtual “C:”. There is a folder called “C” in DOSBox from the start, so you can just use that one. Here is the command you need to type if you want to do it like this:

As you can see from the picture, the command is “mount c c/”.

I put all of my DOS games in this drawer (C), so to run them, I can just type “c:”, then “cd games” (since I have made a folder called games inside) and then choose what to run.

Gameplay

Allright, it is time to take DOSBox for a spin! 🙂 The drawer has been filled up with some classic games from the DOS era, so let’s have a look at what they have to offer. I decided to run them all in fullscreen mode, even though it works well to run it in a window on Workbench too.

First I’d like to try a very old game called Alley Cat. I remember this one being installed on PC’s at school back in the days. It is originally from 1983!

Let’s move on to a game that is a bit newer, namely Jones in the Fast Lane. I actually wrote a review of this game on AmigaOS 4 through ScummVM back in 2016. It is a fun game and I love playing it from time to time. 🙂 Here it is running through DOSBox on SAM460 with good speed:

In the past I’ve only played Moonstone on Amiga, so I thought it would be fun to try out the PC version.

Moonstone runs fine in DOSBox. Will definitely return for some more playing in the future. 🙂

Ok, let’s try Mad TV. This is another one that I have played on the Amiga in the past.

Last game out is UFO: Enemy Unknown, a classic strategy game from MicroProse. 🙂

This game runs fine too and it is great to have the possibility of enjoying this one on AmigaOS 4.1. A very challenging and fun strategy game to play in my opinion.

There are plenty of other titles I could test, but this will have to do for now. 🙂

I’m very happy about how well DOSBox performs on AmigaOS 4.1. It is fast and the games I’ve tried runs great. Some very old ones runs too fast, so you’ll have to do some adjusting to make them slow enough to enjoy. I tried one ancient Snake game and it was so fast that it was game over before I even had a chance to move in any direction, hehe. 😀

So, if you’re an AmigaOS 4 user and would like to play some good classic games, then I highly recommend downloading DOSBox and to get hold of some goodies from the era. Definitely worth it! 🙂 Thumbs up!