Hey all,

Guess what gifts my brother brought me yesterday?  Yes, he cleaned out some old DOS games from his closet.  Some of the games I thoroughly loved:

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Eye of the Beholder II – The Legend of Darkmoon
• Nephi’s Quest – A mormon version of Kings Quest.

Unfortunately my Kings Quest set wasn’t found, though my brother has this if I want it, and Bard’s Tale II wasn’t found.

So I instantly thought of two problems I had to solve:

1. How to read the 5.25″ floppies
2. How to get a DOS system that isn’t so fast the games are unplayable.

Reading the 5.25 floppy drives

Yes, they are on 5.25″ floppies.  So after about 20 minutes of looking online for a USB 5.25″ floppy drive, I gave up.

So my options are:

1. Get an old system with a floppy drive that still works.
2. Send my floppies to a company that will migrate them to a CD at $5 a floppy.
3. Find someone who has already moved the software from the floppies…

Yeah, one and two just weren’t for me, so the alternative was my only option.

Alternative to Reading the 5.25 floppy drives

Ok, so I almost gave up, when my decided that some one out that had a copy of the game downloadable right.  I mean, these games are 20 years old.  They are collectable. So somebody has to have them online.  Since I purchased a license in 1991, I thought I would not be breaking any laws downloading them.

Turns out I didn’t really have to worry about legalities and copyrights.

I found this site: http://www.abandonia.com/

Yes, Abandonia is the land of “abandonware”.  According to them, many of these games no longer have a copyright and are free to download, play, distribute, etc…

So I downloaded my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Eye of the Beholder II – The Legend of Darkmoon game immediately.

How to get a DOS system that isn’t so fast the games are unplayable

Well, my first thought was VMWare, but again, Abandonia helped me out here.  There is a DOS Emulator called DOS Box.

I installed DOS Box on my Windows 7 box at home, with worry that it wouldn’t work well on Windows 7 64 bit, but to  my surprise, it worked well.

I do want to find a way to make the screen bigger.  And it would be cool to have a DOS VM along with DOS Box to test if it is better or worse, but hey this is sufficient for now.

Other Abandoned Games

There were many other abandoned games, such as the first Eye of the Beholder game as well as Eye of the Beholder III.  Also, Bards Tale I, II, III, and hundreds more.

So if you are looking for a blast from the past with one of your favorite games, check it out.