It’s much easier to find an online archive – there are plenty indexed on Google – and download a ROM file that someone else has already ripped. This isn’t terribly convenient, however, nor cheap: the Retrode costs €$65 (around £45), and has been produced in limited quantities. This means that if you own a game cartridge, you can legally dump its contents to your PC using a device such as the Retrode, a USB-based reader for Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive cartridges. British owners of ebooks, CDs and films are legally permitted to make digital copies of their content, as long as they don’t circumvent DRM technology. To play a game you therefore need to obtain a soft copy of the program data, called a ROM file.

You can obtain these by buying an old CD-ROM on eBay – expect to pay between £10 and £30 – or download free and demo games from the project website.Īlthough DOSBox and ScummVM can work with original game discs, most emulators can’t use the original media – after all, there’s nowhere to plug a game cartridge into a modern PC. All you need to run Scumm games is the emulator and the original data files. One last notable emulator worth mentioning is ScummVM, which doesn’t simulate a particular computer at all, but is rather an open-source implementation of the game engine that underpins dozens of 1990s point-and-click adventure games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle and the classic Secret of Monkey Island. For more information, check out the comprehensive DOSBox wiki. DOSBox doesn’t offer an easy way to save your local configuration, although you can create custom configuration files containing different settings, and specify which you want to load from the command line. This is a more complicated approach, but it has the advantage of allowing you to set things up exactly as you want them.

DOSBox isn’t the only way to get old PC games running: if you prefer, you can set up a virtual machine in a host such as the free VirtualBox and install MS-DOS, or a compatible operating system such as FreeDOS.

Download indiana jones super nintendo