New to abandonware? Start with this guide to play DOS games on Windows 7, 8 or 10, or on your Mac. Most games work fine without any tinkering, but some are hard to run properly.

DOSBox-X emulates a PC necessary for running many DOS games and applications that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, similar to DOSBox. However, while the main focus of DOSBox is for running DOS games, DOSBox-X goes much further than this. Forked from the DOSBox project, it retains compatibility with the wide base of DOS games and DOS gaming DOSBox was designed for. But it is also a platform for running DOS applications, including emulating the environments to run Windows 3.x, 9x and Me and software written for those versions of Windows. By adding official support for Windows 95, 98, Me emulation and acceleration, we hope that those old Windows games and applications could be enjoyed or used once more. Moreover, DOSBox-X adds support for DOS/V and NEC PC-98 emulations so that you can play DOS/V and PC-98 games with it.

As you may have noticed, development of DOSBox got somewhat... slow in the recent past. And since DOSBox ECE is based on the SVN of the official DOSBox releases, of course there weren't (m)any new releases of that as well. I must admit, that I wasn't too sorry about the lack of updates. In the last years, the amount of free time shrank to almost nothing anyway and other builds emerged or got better, that IMHO made ECE pretty redundant.

So, as of now, I decided to stop releasing new builds of DOSBox ECE. Not without a tear in the eye, it was nice to have a somewhat popular build and to give something back to a great community! But as of now, I think we're all better off using more up-to-date alternatives like

DOSBox Staging
DOSBox-X
DOSBox Pure (if you're using Retroarch anyway)

At present, DOSBox running on a high-end machine will roughly be the equivalent of a Pentium I PC. DOSBox can be configured to run a wide range of DOS games, from CGA/Tandy/PCjr classics up to games from the Quake era.