Before I show how to get these games running on your Mac, here are links to the two collections that Archive.org has made available. Unfortunately the search feature is not very user friendly and I had to manually go through the whole list to pick out the games that I wanted (list of my picks is further down).
There are two collections, which do not seem to have any overlap:
Download DOSBox for free. An Open Source DOS emulator to run old DOS games. DOSBox emulates a full x86 pc with sound and DOS. Its main use is to run old DOS games on platforms which don't have DOS (Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 / Linux / FreeBSD / Mac OS X).
- Download The following files can be downloaded here: The latest version of Digger Remastered for DOS. The download is 71K. The Digger Remastered extras pack (415K), containing the level editor, extra levels, icons, Windows 95 file associations, the hall of fame games, a screensaver and a utility to extract the high scores from an old Digger floppy disk and convert them to a DIGGER.SCO file.
- Download DOSBox for free. An Open Source DOS emulator to run old DOS games. DOSBox emulates a full x86 pc with sound and DOS. Its main use is to run old DOS games on platforms which don't have DOS (Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 / Linux / FreeBSD / Mac OS X).
Here's when I launched a few of the games to test this out (not it did not work in Safari for me, I had to use Chrome).
Where it gets interesting is being able to run these games directly on your Mac using a DOS emulator, Boxer. You can download Boxer here: http://boxerapp.com. Boxer comes with a number of games pre-installed and you can easily import new games for it with a few clicks.
Not all games from the Archive.org collections have download links however. This is where a bit of trickery is required. Every game has a 'Run' link, which looks like this:
https://archive.org/stream/msdos_Reach_for_the_Stars_-_The_Conquest_of_the_Galaxy_1986/Reach_for_the_Stars_-_The_Conquest_of_the_Galaxy_1986.zip?module=dosbox&scale=2
Note the stream in the address. If you replace stream with download, you can get the game's zip file. Easy!
So for the above link, you get a link like this instead:
https://archive.org/download/msdos_Reach_for_the_Stars_-_The_Conquest_of_the_Galaxy_1986/Reach_for_the_Stars_-_The_Conquest_of_the_Galaxy_1986.zip
I tried the above trick with many games and they all seemed to have worked for me.
So now onto Boxer...When you import a game in Boxer, it can auto-detect if a game needs to be installed or a setup run before the game runs. The games are imported into your User folder under the DOS Games folder. Once a game is imported all you have to do is double-click it to start it.
Here are some screenshots of importing and running Duke Nukem 3D...
I tried running Duke Nukem 3D within a browser, but the performance was less than satisfactory, in Boxer, it ran very well and was like playing it natively.
Using Boxer you have a choice of rendering styles. It can display the game in its original pixels or it can smooth out the pixels either using fast smoothing or fancy smoothing, it can also render the game using a 'TV Scanlines' mode. Here is a comparison of each one in the order listed: original, fast smoothing, fancy smoothing, TV scanlines.
I found little difference between fast and fancy smoothing, however the setting I use now is fancy smoothing as a default.
After having gone through the 2000+ games from Archive.org's collection, here are some of my favourite picks:
Download Dos Games For Mac Windows 10
Some games like all of the Leisure Suite Larry series were not importable by Boxer for some reason. I did manage to get them running by right-clicking the games's .bat file and opening it in Boxer.
Not all the classics are in the collections. I would love to see Crystal Caves and the Duke Nukem (the 2D platformer) in the list, however this is amazing collection and well worth a look.
Download Dos Games For Mac Free
-i