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| Pic. 1. Prince of Persia ... examining a spike trap |
First, you have to experience ... death! Well, that's how you learn the ways to play most of the video games, which allow one to die, anyway. The game I would like to talk about is Prince Of Persia. Do not confuse it with the game of the same name developed by Ubisoft in 2008. This one is special because, first of all, it was developed in 1989, and, second of all, it was initially developed for Apple II and later ported to other operating systems. I've played it before on MS-DOS.
So you play ... as a guy who is trying to save princess from a terribly evil person whom you have to defeat at the end of endless dungeons full of traps and guards. To do so, you have to ... die ... infinite number of times until you remember where all the traps are, learn how to fight the guards with a sword, which you don't have initially. I mean, I can get to the point where I grab a sword, but when I encounter the first guard he kills me ... so sad. Overall, the game is good - simple movement controls such as arrow keys to climb up and down, jump, run; not so simple swordplay; simple scenario - save princess X, and beat boss Y; a numbers of not so unexpected deaths.
As for how experience of playing this game in an emulator compares to that of playing it on the actual DOS-running computer, I would say that I haven't noticed any differences between them. Because MS-DOS is technically a predecessor to MS-Windows operating system, there haven't been any issues with mismatching controls, run-time errors or any kind of performance problems since, apparently, compatibility between the two is high, though the emulator plays the biggest role of all by simulating a functioning DOS operating system.
References: http://playdosgamesonline.com/prince-of-persia.html
