If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app. All without the need for a recovery disc or thumb drive. If you want to play it safe and create a bootable install drive for Mac OS X, you can do so using our guides here for Lion/Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, and El Capitan.
In the “Volumes” tab of the GUI click “Create…” to create a hard disk image file to which you will install Mac OS. Decide how big the hard file image should be (Mac OS requires at least 220 MB for a typical install) and give it a name. Click “OK” to create the file (see figure two). Be patient… it can take a few minutes to create the file. Note: You can only create a hard disk image of a maximum size of 2 GB.
Figure one: Creating a blank hard file for SheepShaver
When the hard file is created, the GUI will return to the “Volumes” tab, and the hard file should be listed as added to your emulated Mac. While it is not necessary for the purposes of this guide, you can check the “Enable 'My Computer'…” box to gain access to files on your PC from within the emulator. This is an easy way to copy downloaded programs to the emulated system. See figure two.
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Figure two: The “Volumes” tab of the SheepShaver GUI. Almost ready to boot!
Switch over to the “Graphics/Sound” tab. You should probably make the resolution a bit bigger than the default setting. Any size is okay. The “Maximum” setting fixes the screen to your current resolution. The other settings here are best left to default for now. See figure three.
Figure three: The “Graphics/Sound” tab of the SheepShaver GUI.
Switch to the “Memory/Misc” tab. Give your emulator some RAM… the more the better. Here you must also select your ROM file. Click “browse” to locate the file. See figure four. Note 1: It has been reported that sometimes SheepShaver crashes when loading MacOS if the emulator's RAM is set to less than 512 MB. Try to set memory to 512 Mb (or use an old world rom) if you experience such a crash. Note 2 : Although not shown in the figure below, it is best to also tick “Ignore Illegal Memory Accesses”.
Figure four: The Memory/Misc tab of the SheepShaver GUI