Did you ever dreamt about having your favorite MS-DOS games with you all the time? Imagine that you are on holiday in France enjoying the Provence sun, your wife is sunbathing beside you, your kids are playing in the pool in front of you and in a glimpse of a moment you have a nostalgic feeling wanting to play Prince Of Persia for DOS, well it can be done 😉

These days, all kids have handhelds, instead of big desktop PC’s, portables, … To my knowledge, playing MS-DOS games using DOSBox on a PSP is the only way to have them enjoyed on handheld today.

If you think about it for a minute, it is a strange combination of 3 things:

• MS-DOS: Microsoft Disk Operating System, a very popular operating system throughout the eighties & nineties for playing games. The first version being 1.0 introduced in August 1981 and the last independent release 6.22 release in 1994.
• DOSBox: is an emulator program that emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running a DOS operating system. Many IBM PC compatible graphics and sound cards are also emulated. It was first released on SourceForge in 2002 and has been downloaded 25 million times since then.
• PSP: Short for Playstation Portable, a handheld game console developed by Sony and releases on May 11, 2004.

Having said that, I would like to share with you my first attempt to run a MS-DOS game on a PSP. You can consider the following as some kind of tutorial for you to try. I will make sure all the downloadable content is available for you.

This article is inspired by a lot of other enthusiasts out there who have tried this out years before my attempt today, so all credits go to all the pages, forums I have visited to make my first attempt to work.

As always, you have to match versions, firmware, … (fun, fun, … 😉 )

The PSP I am using in this article is a PSP3004. Apparently there are 5 different models. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable#Models).

I bought my PSP for 20 euros on a second hand site and it was installed with firmware 6.27.

The first thing I did was upgrading my system software to the latest version via the WIFI connection. (On 4/19/2015 the latest version is 6.61). Make sure you create a WIFI connection with access to the internet.

In the menu of you PSP, under ‘Settings’, choose ‘System Update’.

Choose ‘Update via Internet’ and select the WIFI connection you have configured earlier.

Next step is to downgrade your system version to 6.60. Extract everything from the RETROPALS_DOSBOX_PSP.rar and you should see 3 folders: ‘Chronoswitch Downgrader’, ‘DOSBox_0.71’ and ‘PROUPDATE’.

Connect your PSP via the USB cable to a computer and copy all 3 folders over to this folder on the PSP: ‘ms0:\PSP\GAME’.

Enjoy the little video I made of my first attempt…