Emulation - PC DOS

Operating System Information

DOS is a family of closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995 (or until about 2000, if one includes DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions (Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME). Related systems include MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS (and Novell DOS and OpenDOS, which were based on DR-DOS), FreeDOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, JM-OS and several others.

All of these operating systems run on machines with the Intel x86 or compatible CPUs, mainly the IBM PC and compatibles. Initially, DOS was not restricted to these, and machine-dependent versions of DOS and similar operating systems were produced for many non-IBM-compatible x86-based machines.

DOS is a single-user, single-task operating system with basic kernel functions that are non-reentrant code; once a process is begun, it must be allowed to run until finished before the same process can be used again. The DOS kernel provides various functions for programs, like displaying characters on-screen, reading a character from the keyboard, and accessing disk files.

In spite of the common usage, there has never been a microcomputer operating system called simply "DOS" (though there was a mainframe operating system in the 1960s). A number of unrelated, non-x86 microcomputer disk operating systems had "DOS" in their name, and are often referred to simply as "DOS" when discussing machines that use them (AmigaDOS, AMSDOS, ANDOS, Apple DOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, CSI-DOS, ProDOS, TRS-DOS). These were incompatible with DOS EXE files and the MS-DOS API.

Source: Wikipedia

Emulator Information

Name: DosBox
Official Website: dosbox.com
Additional Notes: Some of these games might actually run under Windows without an emulator. But this is from version of Windows to another version of Windows different. So, we encourage the use of DosBox.