Play Your Favorite DOS Games in XP, Vista, and Windows 7

Posted by Matthew Guay on How to geek See other posts from How to geek or by Matthew Guay
Published on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:00:00 +0000 Indexed on 2010/03/12 13:08 UTC
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Want to take a trip down memory lane with old school DOS games?  D-Fend Reloaded makes it easy for you to play your favorite DOS games directly on XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

D-Fend Reloaded is a great frontend for DOSBox, the popular DOS emulator.  It lets you install and run many DOS games and applications directly from its interface without ever touching a DOS prompt.  It works great on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 32 & 64-bit versions.  

Getting Started

Download D-Fend Reloaded (link below), and install with the default settings.  You don’t need to install DOSBox, as D-Fend Reloaded will automatically install all the components you need to run DOS games on Windows.

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D-Fend Reloaded can also be installed as a portable application, so you can run it from a flash drive on any Windows computer by selecting User defined installation.

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Then select Portable mode installation.

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Once D-Fend Reloaded is installed, you can go ahead and open the program. Then simply click “Accept all settings” to apply the default settings.

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D-Fend is now ready to run all of your favorite DOS games.

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Installing DOS Games and Applications:

To install a DOS game or application, simply drag-and-drop a zip file of the app into D-Fend Reloaded’s window.  D-Fend Reloaded will automatically extract the program…

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Then will ask you to name the application and choose where to store it — by default it uses the name of the DOS app.

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Now you’ll see a new entry for the app you just installed.  Simply double-click to run it.

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D-Fend will remind you that you can switch out of fullscreen mode by pressing Alt+Enter, and can also close the DOS application by pressing Ctrl+F9.  Press Ok to run the program.

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Here we’re running Ms. PacPC, a remake of the classic game Ms. Pac-Man, in full-screen mode.  All features work automatically, including sound, and you never have to setup anything from DOS command line — it just works.

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Here it’s in windowed mode running on Windows 7.

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Please note that your color scheme may change to Windows Basic while running DOS applications.

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You can run DOS application just as easily.  Here’s Word 5.5 running in in DOSBox through D-Fend Reloaded…

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Game Packs:

Want to quickly install many old DOS freeware and trial games?  D-Fend Reloaded offers several game packs that let you install dozens of DOS games with only four clicks…just download and run the game pack installer of your choice (link below).

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Now you’ve got a selection of DOS games to choose from.

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Here’s a group of poor lemmings walking around … in Windows 7.

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Conclusion

D-Fend Reloaded gives you a great way to run your favorite DOS games and applications directly from XP, Vista, and Windows 7.  Give it a try, and relive your DOS days from the comfort of your Windows desktop.

What were some of your favorite DOS games and applications? Leave a comment and let us know.

Links

Download D-Fend Reloaded

Download DOS game packs for D-Fend Reloaded

Download Ms. Pac-PC


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