I've been getting nostalgic for DOS lately. Well, certain DOS games *cough* Railroad Tycoon *cough*.

One of my coworkers' wives is nostalgic for '80s boy bands whose name I refuse to mention, so there certainly are worse things for me to be nostalgic about. Sure, DOS is terrible, but not that terrible.

I'm using an old 128MB compact flash card in a cheap CF-IDE adapter. While 128 megs isn't a lot, it's adequate if you're not going to have Windows and Windows apps loaded. After all, you can get all the DOS you'll ever need for game playing in less than 1.5 megs. Even still, I'll probably pick up a bigger card the next time I order stuff from Newegg. A 4 gig card is cheap, and to DOS, 4 gigs is huge.

DOS boots to a C prompt in about five seconds off the CF card, and a good chunk of that is the CD-ROM driver scanning the IDE channels for drives. The system takes a lot longer to POST than it does to boot.

The system itself is an old Micron Pentium II-266. Severe overkill, but I hear Railroad Tycoon Deluxe really wants a fast CPU. Plus, my 486 is missing in action right now anyway.

Now that I have the system running, I need to hunt down drivers for the system's Sound Blaster card. Then I'll get Railroad Tycoon Deluxe loaded, and then all I'll have to do is find a little time to play it. That last step will probably be the hardest part.

If the games I want to play don't like the P2 (unlikely but possible), I'll just dig out a Pentium 75 or a 486 from somewhere. That won't be a huge setback, since I'll have everything I need gathered up to build the system at that point.