How to play PC booter games

The first IBM PC games often did without DOS. You put the disk in the drive, turned the computer on, and the game started. These are PC booters, and the DOS emulators you may already use run them with one more command.

We have 150 PC booter games on My Abandonware, most of them from 1981 to 1987: Alley Cat, Digger, Paratrooper and the first Microsoft Flight Simulator among them.

Why a game skipped DOS

A booter had the whole computer to itself: all of the memory, and a disk in a format of its own that DOS could not read or copy. Publishers stopped making them in the late 1980s, when hard disks became common.

The cheapest IBM PC of 1981 had no disk drive at all, and PC DOS cost extra. A game that carried its own start-up code ran on any PC with a drive, DOS or not. Its odd disk format was also its copy protection: the DOSBox Staging manual notes that some 200 KB and 400 KB formats were only ever used by booter games.

The same thing made booters a poor fit for the hard disk. There were no files on the disk to copy, so the game could not be installed, and later versions of many of these games were made to run from DOS instead.

Flight Simulator had a second career as a test. A computer that ran it and Lotus 1-2-3 was called 100% IBM compatible.

Which file to download

Most of our booter games come as a version that runs from DOS, and some as a copy of the original disk. Look inside the archive before you start: the two need different steps.

• A file that ends in .EXE or .COM: somebody made the game start from DOS, often by taking the copy protection out. Play it like any DOS game, as our DOS guide explains. Many of these games also have a Play in browser button on their page.
• A file that ends in .IMG or .IMA, often in a download called "Floppy Disk Image": a copy of the original disk. Boot it, as explained below. Lode Runner has both kinds.

Boot a disk image in DOSBox Staging

DOSBox Staging starts a disk image with the BOOT command. It is free and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and our DOS guide explains how to install it.

1. Extract the archive into a folder, for example C:\games\booter.
2. Start DOSBox Staging.
3. Give that folder a drive letter, then boot the image:

MOUNT C C:\games\booter C: BOOT GAME.IMG

You can also start DOSBox Staging from a command prompt with the image as its only argument, dosbox GAME.IMG. It boots the disk at once.

A game on more than one disk. Name all the disks: BOOT DISK1.IMG DISK2.IMG. When the game asks for the next disk, press Ctrl+F4 (Cmd+F4 on a Mac) to swap.

Do not use IMGMOUNT on a booter disk. It is for disks that DOS can read, and a booter disk usually is not one: BOOT is all you need.

Start the game with DOSBox

Chuck Cartia gave us a walkthrough that boots the game each time DOSBox starts, using Spitfire Ace as an example:

1. Create a folder to put your .img files in. For this example, on the C:\ drive, make a folder named DriveImg.
2. Put the file spitfire.img in this folder. Add a line to the [autoexec] section of the dosbox.conf file: boot c:\DriveImg\spitfire.img -l a That's dash ell (for letter) and the drive letter you want to assign.
3. Make sure any other lines using this drive letter are commented out with a #, like this: #mount a a:\ -t floppy
4. That's it... Save the dosbox.conf file and when you start DOSBox, the game should boot and start automatically, just like the good old days when you shoved the disk in and turned on the computer.

In DOSBox Staging, the configuration file is dosbox-staging.conf, and the C: in the boot line must be a drive you mounted earlier in [autoexec]. Don't forget to comment out the boot line when you want to use DOSBox normally again.

Boot a disk image in DOSBox-X

DOSBox-X boots a disk from its menus, with no command to type. It also tries a disk that does not look bootable, which it does on purpose for booter games.

Open Drive, then A, then Boot from disk image, and pick the .img file. To change disks during the game, type IMGSWAP or use the swap entry in the menus.

The game runs too fast

Booters were written for the 4.77 MHz processor of the first IBM PC, and many of them run as fast as the computer lets them. On a modern PC, some are too fast to play.

In DOSBox Staging, set cpu_cycles = 300 in the configuration file: the manual gives it as the speed of that first PC. Some games want even less. The manual names Alley Cat and Sopwith, which need between 140 and 300. While the game runs, Ctrl+F11 slows it down and Ctrl+F12 speeds it up (Cmd on a Mac).

In DOSBox-X, open CPU, then Emulate CPU speed, and pick 8088 XT 4.77MHz.

The colours look wrong

Some games of this era were drawn for a television or a composite monitor, where the CGA card showed more colours than its four. On a modern screen, they show stripes or harsh colours instead.

In DOSBox Staging, set machine = cga, and in the [composite] section set composite = on. Composite works only with the cga, pcjr and tandy machines. In DOSBox-X, Ctrl+F8 turns composite on and off.

PCjr and Tandy 1000 games

IBM's PCjr and the Tandy 1000 had better sound and colours than the PC, and some booters were made for them. Tell the emulator which machine it is.

In DOSBox Staging, set machine = pcjr or machine = tandy. A PCjr cartridge (.jrc) also starts with BOOT on the pcjr machine. A few PCjr games need the 128 KB machine: set pcjr_memory_config = standard. The manual names Jumpman and Troll.

When the disk is copy-protected

A plain .img file cannot hold the tricks of a protected disk. If the game stops at its title screen or asks for its "original disk", the image has lost its protection and DOSBox cannot help.

There are two ways out. The first is a version of the game made to run from DOS, which many of our pages offer next to the disk image. The second is an emulator of the real IBM PC, with a disk image in a format that keeps the protection:

• 86Box (Windows, macOS, Linux) emulates the IBM PC of 1981, the XT, the PCjr and several Tandy 1000s. It reads the 86F, ImageDisk (.imd) and Teledisk (.td0) formats, among others. It needs a set of ROM files, free from its ROM page.
• MartyPC (Windows, macOS, Linux) copies the IBM PC down to each cycle of its processor and runs many protected disks. It also runs in a browser, at martypc.net.
• MAME emulates the IBM PC as ibm5150: mame ibm5150 -flop1 game.img. It needs the BIOS files, as our page about multi-platform emulators explains.

These three take more setting up than DOSBox. Try them when DOSBox has already failed.

I need help!

We do not provide support for running abandonware games. Ask on Vogons, where many people know these early PC games well.

Tell them which game, which emulator, and what you see on the screen: you will get an answer much faster. Have fun!

Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts come from our own catalogue. This guide was drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing; Chuck Cartia's walkthrough is his own. If something here is out of date, tell us.