As you read through the latest print edition of Old School Gamer Magazine, focusing on 8-bit computer gaming, one obvious question may come to mind- how exactly do you play any of these games? The more famous ones might be available via Steam or other modern platforms, but most DOS games have been lost to history. Even the few surviving copies require some fairly finicky workarounds with modern compatibility modes. Well as it happens, the eXoDOS project, now in version 6, will help you scratch that itch with a whopping 7,666 MS-DOS games now supported.
Crucially, all of these games are preconfigured, and should run properly in either DOSBox or ScummVM, so they should all be playable as soon as they’ve been downloaded via torrent with a link available on the eXoDOS website. Even if you’re able to play these games on original hardware, eXoDOS is a good install because it grants easy access to manuals and scans of anti-piracy gadgets like codewheels. One problem with eXoDOS is that the space requirements are pretty extreme- 638 gigabytes for the full release. Another 220 gigabytes for the media pack contains magazines, books, catalogs, soundtrack, TV shows and documentaries adjacent to the MS-DOS games era.
It’s no exaggeration to say that eXoDOS is effectively a museum of all currently documented DOS material. This can be good and bad- there’s no getting around the fact that the majority of this material is shovelware garbage, which may have its own relevance in the halls of PC gaming history, yet might be a bit much for anyone with limited hard drive space on a monthly transfer cap. Fortunately, if you’re only interested in a game-by-game basis, there’s always the lite version, only 5 gigabytes of storage for an interface that lets you download titles one at a time.
This won’t get you anything from the media pack though, which likely has all sorts of material you might have remembered seeing at some point. Remember the old dogfight game, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe from LucasFilm games? It came with an entire separate book (that file coming courtesy of an eXoDOS download) with a full chronological history of the air war in Western Europe from the Luftwaffe’s perspective, filled with photos and anecdotes and appearing, beyond the gaming context, to just be a genuinely excellent history book. Well, that’s just one of the many, many little treasures in the media pack. eXo themselves describes the media pack as, “to me anyways, just as important as the games. The context of the era very important in understanding the impact that the various games made.”
eXo and their team have also been working on scripts and indexes to link every game to any mentions of that game in the various magazines. “From a research perspective,” eXo says, “I also find it very interesting to be able to read about a certain game’s history. From previews all the way through reviews, you get an interesting view into the evolution of the games. Especially with ones by folks like Bullfrog, where Peter Molyneux had a habit of hyping up all kinds of features that were never in the final product. But you can read all about them in the game previews.”
Not to put too much emphasis on eXo themselves. “’eXo’ as an entity does a lot more for the promotion of the project then the real me ever could,” they told me in an e-mail. eXoDOS is a huge volunteer project, and has been ever since its inception in 2007, to the point that it’s not really feasible to thank every single person involved, whether it’s through writing scripts or sending in donations, although the 28-page manual does what it can. Supporting eXoDOS is also a wise decision to make because eXoDOS is quite literally the DOS gaming community, by fans and for fans. While gog.com may have the slicker interface, their paid service has been caught multiple times compiling DRM-free version of DOS games from the eXoDOS collection, getting caught by failing remove eXoDOS specific file IDs.
Though accessible to more casual computer users, eXoDOS still allows for the freedom many associate with the 8-bit computing era. It can be imported into LaunchBox, for example. It’s available in German, Polish, Czech, and Slovak in addition to English, and can even be patched to work in Linux. You’ll find no better way to scratch that retrocomputing itch than to take a stroll down through the files of eXoDOS. And maybe eXoIF too- this similar project, documenting interactive fiction, is up to 876 titles going as far back as 1974, emulating over fifty different types of computers from mainframes to calculators. For now, it’s only 16.3 gigabytes- though this will likely increase with the upcoming version.
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