Short of building a 286 with 3.5" floppy is there anyway to obtain and play these games on a modern PC?
I have fond memories of being surrounding by - literally - the entire screen of pixelated mobs and loved the squad/party based combat.
Legal only of course, I have no idea if these late 80s early 90s gems are freeware now or not or if someone like Good Old Games is planning a digital version. I would imagine you could put the entire series of games in a 10MB download 
I’ve no idea where to obtain them today but I remember trying to play them years ago on a K6-2 processor (133MHz?)
Unless I used an application to throttle the game to 1%, the game was unplayable. Enemy movement happened in a blink and tapping a movement key would shoot your character in that direction and use up all of their points.
I guess what I’m saying is not to bother trying to get them unless they’ve been optimized for a modern system.
I’m not aware of them being sold online - the last gasp of the Gold Box was Unlimited Adventures, which you could probably run in a DOS-Box emulator. Still would need the floppy drive to get a legal copy…
I assumed as much 
Bummer I need an old school party based RPG fix.
Looks like (according to Wiki’s page on ‘Gold Box’) a DOS/WIN collection was released in 2001 - that’d be your best bet for getting them on CD-ROM though you’d still need to DOSBox to emulate an appropriate environment.
They just released an updated version of the original Baldur’s Gate.
Not quite as oldschool as you’re looking for, but still fairly old school.
I’ve been wondering whether digital re-vamping and distribution would have changed the position relatively tolerated abandonware sites like Home of the Underdogs found themselves in.
In any case, several of the Gold Box games can be found relatively cheaply in the Forgotten Realms Silver Archives, and I didn’t have too much trouble getting them to run in DosBox a couple of years ago.
Heh, there’s a review from 2000 on that page saying you needed to use MoSlow to play them. Sounds familiar!
Cool find though to be able to get them through legitimate retail.
Oh man, moslo? I haven’t heard about that program in years. 
I played through all of them this year (well, I didn’t finish Pools of Darkness yet). They all run fine on DOSBox, though you might have to do some manual editing of config files in order to transfer characters between games.
I’ve run other late-80’s games in DosBox without too much trouble. It’s usually a lot of trial and error getting DosBox slowed down to the right speed-- it would be nice if there were just presets for older systems. One thing that’s sort of counter intuitive is that (at least in my experience) getting really old games to run smoothly on DosBox requires a much beefier computer than just running a 486 or Pentium era title.
If we’re talking *really *old school look up Legend of Grimrock, a recent tribute to the Gold Box/Eye of the Beholder/early Might&Magic era. They have a Let’s Play of it going over at Something Awful if you want to get an idea of how the game plays, what it looks like and such.
If you’re talking really old school, you get the original Bard’s Tale trilogy included with the 2005 version now. I didn’t mention it earlier since it lacks the combat mechanics of the SSI Gold Box games.
I guess (from what everyone else said), the games work fine in DosBox. Back when I played them, it was directly through the command line prompt in the Win98 DOS shell.
I’ve played some of them with a c64 emulator, but the legality of that is questionable.
Might they count as abandonware if there’s no legal way to get them now?
I would be DEEPLY shocked if you can’t find them for download somewhere on the internet with a little bit of diligent searching. And yes, they’re pretty much the textbook case of “abandonware” (a term with no legal significance, mind you. No one is REQUIRED to sell you their stuff.)
All that said, there has to be a better way to get a party based RPG fix than to play one of those…ahem, games of dubious merit. I remain to this day, astonished by the following they seem to have, considering that I was EXACTLY their target market back in the day and I didn’t even like them THEN. x.x Sadly though, most of the suggestions I would make involve either console titles or further dubious legality. Or both.
Look at abandonia.com to find the games.
You can buy most of them on GOG.com
They are also selling the aformentioned Legend of Grimrock for $7.50 right now.
Not sure why you are saying this, because…no, you can’t.
The only vaguely D&D related games that I can find on GOG are Icewind Dale (1 and 2) and Neverwinter Nights, neither of which are “gold box” games, though Icewind Dale MIGHT meet the demand for a party-based tactical RPG thing.