Video games are still a young medium, but they are now reaching an age where “retro gaming” is an ever increasing market. Sony Computer Entertainment, for example, recently celebrated the 20 year anniversary of PlayStation with a special edition PlayStation 4 designed to look like the original console.

Many gamers now entering their 30s are feeling nostalgic for the games they enjoyed as children, but unfortunately, it is not as easy to play old games as it is to read an old book or watch an old movie.

Although movie formats have been a revolving door of reels, cassettes and discs, it is usually not too hard to find a new version of a classic film.

Until very recently, video games have been less fortunate, especially when it comes to PC games. It is not uncommon to find people still holding on to their old NES or Atari systems to continue playing the games they loved (if not, there is always eBay), but not too many people keep their 25 year old PCs around.

Fortunately, there are a couple of free tools out there that enable your computer to play games like it’s 1995: DOSBox and ScummVM. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the games you want to play and how computer savvy you are.

DOSBox vs ScummVM

DOSBox

DOSBox is an incredibly powerful tool with one main drawback: It’s not exactly user friendly. The program is essentially an MS-DOS emulator with a few tools baked in to aid in game installation.

I tested out DOSBox with Masters of Orion II: Battle at Antares (1992), a turn-based strategy game in the vein of Civilization, and MechWarrior 2 (1995).

One method of installing a game in DOSBox is copying the game’s data files to your hard drive. This will allow you to run the game in the future without having to insert the CD.

This process worked for Masters of Orion fairly easily, but MechWarrior 2 was much more involved. MechWarrior 2 required creating an image of the CD and mounting it along with a directory on my hard drive to install it.

If that sounds like Greek to you, then DOSBox might not be your best option.

ScummVM

The biggest limitation ScummVM has over DOSBox is it only supports certain games. DOSBox can theoretically handle any MS-DOS game you throw at it, but ScummVM focuses on a smaller selection, mainly Lucas Arts adventure games from the early ‘90s like Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It also supports many games from Sierra Entertainment and a few from Activision.

Installing a game in ScummVM is incredibly simple compared to DOSBox. Click Add Game, choose the directory where the game files are located, and hit OK. That’s it. No mounting image files. No text file editing. No command prompt.

The benefit of ScummVM is the ease of use for the games it does support, as well as a GUI interface that makes it simple to change graphics and audio settings.

Because the screen resolution for many old games is very small compared to the size of modern monitors, both DOSBox and ScummVM offer different options that scale up the size of the game window.

This can cause the already pixelated graphics to look even worse in some games, but there are different graphics scaling options that can smooth out some of the edges. Many purists consider the modified graphics to look worse than the original, but it is up to personal preference.

Example of scaling from Day of the Tentacle. Left: Normal 3x scaling. Right: AdvMAME3x scaling

In DOSBox you have to edit a configuration text file to change settings, which requires a knowledge of all of the settings available, the commands for them, and how they work. In ScummVM it is as simple as checking a box or choosing an option from a dropdown menu.

With ScummVM, settings for graphics scaling, sound quality, and more can be changed either across the board or for individual games.

Which is better?

Both DOSBox and ScummVM have their uses. DOSBox pulls ahead in some cases simply because it is the only system that will run many games. Being comfortable working in a command prompt definitely helps, but some patience and time spent on Google is enough to eventually figure out the process for most games.

But it’s hard to beat the ease of use with ScummVM, making it preferable to DOSBox for the games that it supports. And even better, it is available on Android.