Good Old Games
If you like classic games, then GOG is the online game retailer for you. Not only do they have a great selection of retro and modern games, but best of all they are provided DRM free.
Many of the old DOS games that GOG sells come preconfigured to run DOSBox behind the scenes. For those of you not familiar with DOSBox, it is the leading open source DOS emulator.
This is great because GOG can offer the original game experience without having to modify any of the game files or their content. Also, this allows users to run those same games on any platform that has a port of DOSBox available!
DosBox Turbo for Android
There are three DOS emulators available on Android, the best of which (by far) is DosBox Turbo. It costs approximately $3 dollars, but I assure you that it is worth every penny. It is feature rich, stable, and fast.
DosBox Turbo on the Google Play Store
Additionally there is a free app called DosBox Manager that helps manage your DosBox configuration profiles for game or program that you wish to run. This is extremely useful and I strongly suggest that you get it, especially because (as mentioned before) it is free!
DosBox Manager on the Google Play Store
Installation & Configuration
- Install Android Applications
Simply install the two applications, DosBox Turbo amd DosBox Manager, from the Google Play store.
- Get GOG Games
Purchase, download, and install your desired GOG games onto your computer. Not all GOG games use DOSBox, thus not all GOG games will run on Android; here is a list of games GOG games that use DOSBox.
- Copy GOG Games to Android
Connect your android device to your computer, create a DOS folder at the root of your storage, and then copy your GOG games to there. Note: You do not have to copy the DOSBox folder.
Here is an example of where I installed Master of Orion on my computer, and which folders I copied to my ASUS Transformer tablet.
- Configure DosBox Manager
If you are using DosBox Manager, then you will never have to launch the DosBox Turbo application directly. Once your games are copied over, launch DosBox Manager so that you can create profiles for your games.
- Copy DosBox Profile
Copy the "Default" DosBox configuration by clicking and holding down on the icon. When prompted, select "Copy Profile" and enter the new name of your game; in my example this would be "Master of Orion".
- Configure DosBox Profile
This is by far the most complicated step. Click and hold down on the new configuration file, and when prompted select "Edit Configuration". Each game configuration could be different, but there are at least 2 or 3 steps that will always need to be updated.
First, scroll down in the configuration and enable "Screen Scaling". This will allow your screen resolution to scale up to the full screen size of your Android device.
Second, for a game like Master of Orion, I would suggest setting your "Mouse Tracking" option to "Absolute (experimental)". This will allow you to click on the screen like a touch screen instead of moving the mouse around like a touch pad. Note: This may not be ideal for all gaming experiences.
Third, and this is the most important step, we must edit the Autoexec to launch your game! Select the "DosBox Settings" sub-menu, and then select "Autoexec". Here we can enter a series of commands that will be automatically executed whenever this DosBox profile launches. Here are the commands to launch Master of Orion from the directory that I copied it's files to earlier:
mount c: /storage/sdcard0/ c: cd: dos/orion orion.exe
That's it, you are done! Click "OK" and back out of the menu until you return to the DosBox Manager home screen.
- Set DosBox Profile Icon
This step is completely optional, but I like to set Profile Icons for my games. Click and hold down again on your game profile, select "Change Icon", and then navigate to and select whichever image you would like to be your profile icon.
- Launch Your Game
You are now ready to play GOG games on your Android device. Simply click on the game Profile that you would like to play, and have fun!
Enjoy,
Tom
