Open Source Gaming – Week Five – Emulation

I’m sorry for the lack of my post last night for those that noticed, I’m afraid I got home late last night and with how late it was, I decided not to bother. However, I received an encouraging email from a reader which made me smile. Thank you, you know who you are.

As always, it’s Sunday, my personal favourite day to relax. And today, I’m going to offer you a very unusual way to relax today, a way of playing legacy games on newer systems. While I’m not going to offer you any links to download the ones that break copyright law, I will say that a quick Google search will pull up any game you might so desire. As with a lot of things in life, there are legal uses for these emulators, as well as illegal. So while I might not link you to the illegal ones, be assured, there are always ways to use these as you wish. All I ask is for you to be aware of the laws inside your country and for you not to break them. With that being said, let’s start.

WINE (9 mb)

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. To an extent, they’re right: they are providing a compatibility layer for the non-Windows systems, like Linux, BSD, and Mac, but they are emulating parts of Windows, such as file structures and dlls. While not foolproof by any means (it messed up my copy of SiN: Emergence for example), it remains the single best way to find a way of working with Windows if you have issues with running it by default. I’ve found it works much better with Windows apps then CrossOver, the commercial aspect of Wine. The other fact that it’s free to use, no matter if you’re a company or a individual remains one of it’s better points and the other fact that it’s always fully supported, means if you ever have questions, you can just go ahead and ask.

DOSBox (1.4 mb)

DOSBox, as the name implies, is a DOS emulator that works with 99.5% of nearly everything written for DOS. I have honestly had only two problems ever with it, and it was only because I didn’t type the command correctly. DOSBox can run MSDOS though to Windows 98 games pretty well, able to bring back great memories as well as some painful ones if you never liked DOS very much. If you make sure to read the manual in how to work with DOSBox, you will run into no problems and I’ve actually been able to run some very old (1989) games inside of it without any problems whatsoever.

ScrummVM (3.4 mb)

Finally, ScrummVM is a way of playing the older point-and-click type games that as they say on their site, replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed. This allows for certain point-and-click games to work from Windows 3.11 to work on Windows 7, as well as allowing them access to Mac and Linux users as well. One of my favourite examples to point out is an actually pretty great point-and-click games, which is Beneath A Steel Sky which for an older game, remains one of the best science fiction games I’ve played thanks to a rather remarkable story.

Unlike today’s games where storytelling has all but been removed for multi-player and blood, there are still quite a few hidden gems that can now be replayed by these programs. Wine is designed for help non-Windows users in playing Windows games, DOSBox can be used to revive old DOS based games, and ScrummVM allows for old point-and-click games to become reborn. This is my favourite thing about technology, allowing for the old to be reused and become new again. What better way to spend a nice Sunday then to remember the stress-free past exactly the way it was? Remakes are all fine and good, but sometimes, we just need the originals, and though the power of emulation, once more, we are able to get what we so desire.

Links to older Open Source Gaming articles
Week One – First Person Shooters
Week Two – Simulation
Week Three – Remakes of Classics
Week Four – Strategy Games