Microsoft does something good!

I know. I'm every bit as shocked as you are.

Backstory: a few months ago, I found a bunch of old PC games from when I was a kid. Being the nostalgiac sort, I wanted to give them a try - see if they were as much fun as I remembered.

There was one twist I hadn't counted on, although I should have seen it coming. Every single one of these games was meant to be run through MS-DOS (accessible through Windows, but DOS had to be there in the background). Windows XP, which is what my computer has, was one of the first - if not the first (not sure on 2000 or ME) - versions of Windows to not be coded on top of DOS. Sure, there's the 'Command Prompt', which looks a lot like DOS, but it's no help here.

I'd run into this problem before, with games that were never meant to be run through Windows in the first place (Shadow President, for example - and no, I won't field queries as to why I still play a 16-year-old game in which you're the President of the United States). With that sort of thing, I'd always been able to get around the problem by using DOSbox, a freeware DOS emulator.

That didn't work here. My guess would be that there were two factors at play here: trying to run the games from a CD rather than a hard drive, and the fact that DOSbox isn't a real operating system.

Giving up for the time being, I packed the games away and forgot about them for a while.

A few months later, I somehow stumbled across the perfect solution - Microsoft Virtual PC. It is perhaps the only thing Microsoft has ever done that I've truly been glad for (as I discovered going through these old games, the Microsoft-produced Monster Truck Madness didn't age well). Virtual PC lets you take part of your computer's resources, and essentially sets up a partition - with which you're free to do anything you want.

For example, one of the main features Microsoft touts for this program is the ability to use it to run multiple operating systems - and since I found a never-used copy of Windows 98 sitting around here not too long ago, it was just what I needed! I can now turn on my computer, surf the Internet or listen to music for a bit, think "I want to play some NHL 97 (the only game I still use this for)", boot up the Virtual PC, and suddenly have what is essentially two computers running at once - with the ability to switch back and forth with just a couple keystrokes!

The only downside I can see to Virtual PC is its limited scope - how many people will want to play old PC games? And if you have another use for it, coding for example, wouldn't you likely not be the type to use Windows in the first place? Nonetheless, Microsoft has (for once) saved the day. I am able to play a twelve-year-old computer game on a ten-year-old operating system, and be only a split-second away from going back to doing more typical stuff on XP. Go Microsoft.

--Ryan