I’m getting a hankering to play some old games. However, my computers now are way too advanced to run them. I have a feeling if I research this myself, I’m going to end up with a few nasty virii so if somebody can recommend a few good alternatives, I would be grateful.
The features I am looking for:
Yip. That’s the gold standard now for DOS emulation. It can even run Windows 3.1 perfectly well on my single core processor. And any retro-DOS game being sold today comes with it.
If you have a bit of trouble with configuration, try one of the “front-ends” mentioned on the DosBox wiki.
(I love how open source software has adopted the wiki format for help files. It just makes sense.)
I use Dosbox with Loonies’ front end.
There are a few specific emulators out there as well. For example, if you want to play any of the old LucasArts games that use SCUMM, get ScummVM. DosBOX works, but ScummVM is a bit easier to use for those games.
If you want to play old-but-not-too-old games, the kind that runs fine on old versions of Windows but crap out on XP/7 for some reason (Thief comes to mind, here…), you might also want to look into virtual machines. I’m mostly familiar with the VMware freeware myself, which lets you run an entirely separate virtual PC within your regular Windows.
You can partition it, run any Windows on it, boot it in full DOS with a virtual bootdisk… you can even install a VM inside another VM, although of course if you go too wild on the recursive nonsense it all becomes slow as hell and M.C. Escher comes to your house to ding you alongside the ear.
Out of curiosity, what games were you looking to revisit?