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Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, One Must Fall: 2097? Any of these ring a bell? Chances are you’ve played these when Microsoft’s DOS was the predominant PC operating system. DOSBox makes playing a lot of those classic DOS games possible on a wide range of modern operating systems. In OSX, however, it’s not just possible to play these games, it’s very to easy to set up as well with Boxer, an application that bundles DOSBox with an OSX frontend.

After installing Boxer, dig up a copy of your favorite old DOS game that’s supported by DOSBox. Copy the files into a folder on your Mac (you do still have a 5.25″ floppy drive, right?). Start up Boxer and drag-and-drop the folder where indicated. That’s it.

Drag-and-drop your games here to install.

If the game needs to run and install or setup program, Boxer will give you a chance to do either before starting the game. Boxer even comes pre-bundled with Commander Keen 4 and demos of Epic Pinball, Ultima Underworld, and X-COM: UFO Defense. There are additional pre-packaged demo games you can download separately as well.

For recreating the video arcade game experience on the PC, MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is the standard. It works by recreating the hardware circuitry of older arcade machines and loading the game software within this emulated environment. Everything from the CPU, video, sound, and RAM chips is emulated. Under MAME, a wide variety of arcade machines are emulated, from the old Williams machines that ran Joust to the newer CPS3 systems that run the Street Fighter III series. Emulation support for new systems is also added from time to time.

While the official release of MAME is built for Windows, various other flavors of MAME are released for a variety of platforms. One such flavor is SDLMAME, which is easy to build in just about any *NIX environment that supports the SDL library. Another feature of SDLMAME is that it follows the official MAME releases closely: updates to MAME are quickly added to SDLMAME.

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