DOSBox

I still have a bunch of old DOS games that weren't all working quite so well on my old Win98 machine that the kids play with. So last week I put DOSBox on it, and wrote down the instructions for mounting the directory where all the old games are. I told my son, "There. That might make some of them work better. It might not. Follow these instructions and don't bother me with any questions."

Well, to begin with, the sound still didn't work on any of them, which didn't really bother him too much, because he makes some pretty good sounds all on his own while he's playing. A few days ago I saw him just sitting there looking at the screen. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm figuring it out," he said.

A few hours later: "I GOT THE SOUND TO WORK!!!"

So now he knows how to start DOXBox and mount the drive, and he fiddled around with all the settings until he got the sound card to recognize those old games. He's eight years old, which puts him pretty far ahead of where I was at that age. I'm pretty sure I had never even heard the word "computer" when I was his age.