W.R. Hutsell’s Wargames were designed in a simpler day – long before Microsoft Windows. In those days many people ran DOS – and it was on this program that Hutsell’s games were designed to run. Thankfully, it is very easy to make Hutsell’s games run on a contemporary computer – whether you are using Microsoft Windows (most common), Mac OS X (second), or any of the various distributions of Linux.
This is all possible utilizing an emulator. An emulator is a software application that runs on your computer and makes the computer appear to old DOS programs (including Hutsell’s games) as if it is a DOS computer.
DOSBox is free. You can download it from http://www.dosbox.com/. We’ll look at how to get Hutsell’s Games up and running on Windows using DOSBox. If you have another system please read the DOSBox documentation available at http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Main_Page to learn the specifics of how to configure Hutsell’s Games to run on your computer.
- Download the Hutsell Game you want to play and run the executable. This will install the game on your Windows computer. By default it will install the game at c:\nameofgame.
- Download DOSBox and run the installer.
- Once DOSBox has been installed, launch the DOSBox application. At the prompt type: mount c c:\nameofgame and hit enter.
- Type c:\ at the prompt and hit enter.
- Type the name of the game file (e.g. for Civil War Strategy it is cws, for Civil War Battleset it is cw25) and the game will launch.
- That is all there is to it!