>install DOSBox for Mac

Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.

Nowadays the three most popular one would be DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, and DOSBox Staging

https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x

https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed/

https://www.dosbox-staging.org/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging

This seems like a good place to mention boxer for macos. Sadly discontinued in 2016

https://boxerapp.com/

which was then continued via boxer-plus which adds apple silicon support

https://github.com/Solid7s/Boxer-Plus

edit: I think it has apple silicon support. I am getting mized messages when I look it up.

Heroic Launcher makes it even simpler, also for non-DOS Windows games (both very old and newer) - https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

This is why Rosetta 2's looming retirement sucks.

My favourite project to run these old games was Boxer (1). Based on dosbox, it creates a runnable self contained disk (app) for each game or set of games / software. It is pretty neat, but I am not sure if it has been maintained recently.

1 boxerapp.com

This is awesome, and I can't wait to have the time to set this up and install my GOG library .. but one thing has been bugging me for a long time about my GOG library, and that is: local multiplayer network gaming was awesome then.

So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?

I really respect all the work done by enthusiasts to, for example, make DOS games work on other OS as well as all emulators more generally.

Obviously all these binaries can be decompiled into assembly. I really think this is somewhere where Claude can do a lot of heavy lifting to reconstruct source code in a higher-level language that can then be built into something that can run natively on other platforms. AI might be able to do that work directly too.

Now this might have some legal issues. Emulation and recompilation (with distribution) are fundamentally different (legally speaking). Still, it'd be a nicer solution.

I'm not sure if this works well for more demanding games, but recently I wanted to let my kid play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail and just built a webpage for those games using js-dos. It worked well enough for those games.

Is it really necessary to first install and copy from a Windows machine?

at this point, considering ppl have gotten classic MacOS to run in the browser, maybe that will be the future at some point...

Numerous games avaiable on GOG are playable via ScummVM. Just install it on Mac and download the installer. This includes my beloved Monkey Island series including 1,2,3 and you might try 4 (status Bugged on https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/)

  <ADVERTISEMENT>

and other great titles like Gobliiins, Police Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Indiana Jones, Sam & Max hit the road, The Day of The Tentacle and many many more.

If this works I wonder why GOG doesn’t do it automatically.

Sergio

learn a lot and get a lot of old memory too