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How to make old games work on Windows 7

Getting old games running should be easy. Those old system requirements? Irrelevant! The tools at our disposal? Endless!

We've got virtual machines and emulators and online fan projects and - cough - eBay access to damn near everything ever released and everything else we could ever want.

Indeed, 90 per cent of the time, getting an old classic up and running is a piece of cake. Sod's law being what it is, though, the game you really want to play will usually land in that fiddly other 10 per cent, and when that happens, you're on your own. Well, no longer.

Over the next few pages, we'll show you how to get almost any old game back up and running on your PC, starting with simple 'just work, please' instructions to DOSBox, and scaling up to deal with the Four Horsemen of Incompatibility: Windows, QuickTime, DirectX and 3D.

We say 'almost', because unfortunately some games just won't play ball. If you want to be absolutely, positively certain, you don't have much choice but to head to eBay and actually hunt down or put together a new system using decades-old technology.

This is doable, but more than a little bit of a pain, since you'll need everything from the right processor and memory to an authentic soundcard. Luckily, these instances are few and far between, and rarely involve the kind of games that you're realistically likely to want to play these days.

Interactive movies, for instance, tend to be amongst the biggest nuisances to get running, but they're also some of the worst games ever, so it's no great loss.

Before delving too deeply into things, it's also worth checking to see if either Good Old Games , Steam or smaller sites such as DotEmu have the game that you're after.

Part of what you're paying for on these sites is a version of the game designed to run on modern systems, typically via a pre-configured version of DOSBox. You pay for the privilege, but typically not very much. It's worth it to skip the headaches, especially in complicated games that use fancy graphics, come on multiple CDs, or have very, very specific system requirements.

If none of the aforementioned sites have what you're after though, read on for everything you need to know to do it yourself.

DOSBox made easy

DOSBox is an x86 emulator that also recreates Microsoft's old DOS operating system. Words cannot express what a wonderful tool it is.

It doesn't simply play games - it handles any sound translation between the Soundblaster drivers of the day and whatever you have in your box; it deals with memory for you; it can mount ISO images of CDs; it can record in-game footage; and much, much more.

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