I love the Good Old Games - they weren’t designed to hook you to the screen, induce addiction and make you spend money on virtual axes. You bought the game once, and you enjoyed it, no subscriptions needed; it was also easy to play. The graphics wasn’t that advanced (that’s good - no perception overload) but they’re highly entertaining still. The emulators for C64, Amiga 500 and DOS may not be easy to set up on Linux, so I added this manual. All the emulators below support ARM64 as well.

You can get the old games for example from the myabandonware.com.

C64

Commodore 64 was insanely popular back in the 80’s. To have it running on your Linux, run

$ sudo apt install vice

Then you need the machine ROM which you can purchase or download from the internet if you search for e.g. “Commodore 64 romset”. Then, create a folder in your home folder named ~/.local/share/vice/C64/ and make sure it has contents like the following:

basic-901226-01.bin    chargen-906143-02.bin  kernal-390852-01.bin  kernal-901227-02.bin  kernal-901246-01.bin
chargen-901225-01.bin  kernal-251104-04.bin   kernal-901227-01.bin  kernal-901227-03.bin  kernal-906145-02.bin

Now you can run the emulator:

$ x64sc

The emulator will start in C64 mode by default.

The games are usually available as .d64 Floppy Disk images which you can mount to the diskette drive “8” via Vice’s UI. Then, type in LOAD "*",8,1 and enjoy the game!

Note: when running from Ubuntu Linux running on UTM, you may need to disable the 3d acceleration otherwise the emulator will only show a blank screen.

Amiga 500

You can get the emulator by installing

$ sudo apt install fs-uae

Run it once:

$ fs-uae

It will create the directories in ~/Documents/FS-UAE; you need to place ROMs into ~/Documents/FS-UAE/Kickstarts/, they will be named such as:

kick100.rom  kick110.rom  kick120.rom  kick130.rom  Kick13.rom  kick204.rom  kick310.rom

The games are available as .adf floppy disk images which you pass in via command line:

$ fs-uae --floppy-drive-0=Lemmings.adf

The game is started right away. If not, press F12 and select the image in the floppy drive. See the FS-UAE getting started on how to add multiple floppies.

Note: when running from Ubuntu Linux running on UTM, you may need to disable the 3d acceleration otherwise the emulator will only show a blank screen.

DOSBOX

DOSBOX is a DOS emulator. It already comes with a Free DOS preinstalled, so no need to download ROMs. Simply run DOSBOX:

$ dosbox -fullscreen -scaler super2xsai

This will start DOSBOX in full screen and capture the mouse so that it can be used by the games. You can select a different DOSBOX scaler. To run the game, mount the directory where the game is:

mount c ~/games
c:
cd lemmings
lemmings