Play Your Favorite DOS Games in XP, Vista, and Windows 7
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.
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.
Then select Portable mode installation.
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.
D-Fend is now ready to run all of your favorite DOS games.
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…
Then will ask you to name the application and choose where to store it — by default it uses the name of the DOS app.
Now you’ll see a new entry for the app you just installed. Simply double-click to run it.
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.
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.
Here it’s in windowed mode running on Windows 7.
Please note that your color scheme may change to Windows Basic while running DOS applications.
You can run DOS application just as easily. Here’s Word 5.5 running in in DOSBox through D-Fend Reloaded…
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).
Now you’ve got a selection of DOS games to choose from.
Here’s a group of poor lemmings walking around … in Windows 7.
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
i always knew about dosbox, but not d-fend. this looks sweet. i can’t think of just one favorite game, so i’ll name a few:
wolfenstein 3d
doom
relentless
battle chess
An old buddy of mine and I were just reminiscing this past weekend about the Space Quest games we used to play, as well as some of those older PC games and wondered how we could bring life to them again.
This is perfect timing! Bookmarked and forwarded! Thanks!
Yeah, Microsoft Word/Works for DOS in an emulator under Windows! Hey, not everyone has a copy of—the expensive—Office for Windows.
Great stuff
I designed the little pixel ghost for the project, glad the program is getting the recognition it deserves, it’s a wonderful project
Some of my Favorite DOS games were Star Trek Next Generation, Lemmings, Myst, X-Wing Fighter, and Tie Fighter. I’m not sure if I still have the media, but I might try this out later this month.
Unfortunately, DOS is too new for most of my favorite old games. I had to use VICE.
Yay, the perfect excuse to hunt down Scorched Earth again.
Superb article!
Love Lemmings, & now I can play it again…
Thank You Very Much.
hey are all of these demos in the sense that they aren’t a full game?
@milogert – Some of the games are demos, but there are many DOS games in the gamepacks that are full-length free games.
@Matthew Guay oh ok thank you!
I was not aware of this until today. Well, I guess that blows my afternoon. Thanks!
Great article! Congrats.
D-Fend Reloaded data package run fine in portable versions of D-Fend?
@Hawk – I believe it should work fine … just choose your D-Fend folder on your portable drive when you’re installing the pack. Give it a shot, and let us know how it works! Anything that runs portable is awesome
I have an old school game Dungeon Keeper. How do I install the game and have it run from D-Fend in Windows 7?
Does it support What about pharlap memory manager?
Does it support pharlap memory manager?
Cant even download the fuckin program
Will this work with 64 bit?
@mike – Yup, it runs great on 64 bit editions of Windows … in fact, when testing it for this article I ran it on Windows 7 Professional x64.
Thanks so much! I wanted to introduce my boyfriend to two of my all-time favorite games: Master of Magic and Princess Maker 2. Now I can play them again! Hello, magical empire; goodbye, life…
i have everything running but theirs no sound any help
Fantastic program! One question: When I save my game progress, where is that being stored? I loaded the game up again today and none of my game saves were there.
I’m trying to play the old DOS version of x-wing. The game runs great but I can’t get it to recognize the joystick (usb joystick)
Running Vista 32 Home Premium 32 bit OS
I’ve gone into thje DOSBOX config file and set joystick to AUTO, but still no luck. Any suggestions
Thanks
This is just perfect, thanks very much
Hi all. A little disappointed because I couldn’t get anything to work, even the Dos game packs and Ms PacMan. When I tried to run the games, Dos started then turned itself off almost immediately without warning. Anyone know the reason for this? Also, the one game I could get to work – TV Sports Boxing – seemed fine but didn’t recognise my USB joystick, which made the gameplay very difficult. Anyone know how to get the joystick working (it’s all calibrated, etc and there’s no way within the game to select joysticks). Thanks!