Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0QsrqzwXII
Using A 17 Year Old Mac Pro To Play DOS Games Under Windows 11 With eXoDOS
Introduction
I recently acquired this Intel Mac Pro 3,1 from early 2008. It seemed a shame to let such a beast go to waste, so I did what any sensible person would - installed Windows 11 on it, and then used eXoDOS to play DOS games.
Script
Previously on the channel, I did a teardown of this 17 year old Intel Mac Pro - I showed off all of the hardware inside and did a bit of a tour, got it cleaned out, got it repasted and rebuilt, and fired it up for the first time in years - and straight off the back of that video, I told myself that I was going to put this one to one side for a while, you know, stick it on a shelf and have a think about what I wanted to do with this machine longer term.
But as you can probably see, things didn’t go to plan, and can you blame me? I mean - 8 cores, 22GB of RAM, this thing is an absolutely insane spec for 2008, and I needed to come up with an equally insane project for it.
Now, if you remember, quite recently I installed Windows 11 on a 20 year old Pentium 4 system, so I thought this might be a good candidate for something similar, and it turns out that, despite the fact that it was a huge pain to get installed and running on here, It’s actually a brilliant Windows 11 machine.
So, from that point, I thought, well, what do you do with a 17 year old Mac running the very latest Microsoft operating system?
Well - I mean, you play DOS games on it, of course.
First up, I need some installation media for Windows 11, and that’s going to come in the form of a USB stick - so this is a process that I’ve been fiddling with for the past few days, trying to get this workflow as streamlined and easy as possible.
So this is just a bog standard USB 3 stick, doesn’t really matter which one you use - I think it does need to be at least 8GB though, maybe 16 plus just to be on the safe side - and I’m going to be using a tool called Rufus, which I’ll just fire up here - and of course this will be linked down in the description as well.
So we need to select our disk image, and in this case I’m using Windows 11 23H2, which is actually the previous release - the current one is 24H2 - and I have been experimenting with that, and I just couldn’t get it to work - the installer is different, Microsoft changed the installer at some point, and it just freezes part way through the installation process and just goes into a boot loop, but 23H2 is still current, it’s still supported, still gets security updates, and hopefully we can upgrade it to 24 at some point in the future. But for now, we’re just interested in getting a working and current and supported copy of Windows 11 on this ancient Intel Mac Pro.
We do need to change a few of the settings in here - so if we just change GPT to MBR. Now the Mac Pro does support UEFI but it’s a slightly kind of nonstandard implementation - it was quite an early implementation based on my understanding and it’s not really 100 percent compatible - so you do have to install this in MBR mode and there are a few caveats with that but nothing that’s really kind of going to affect our day to day use of this system so this is perfectly fine - and just check that this is set to BIOS, and then we’ll just go down here - no need to change any of these other settings here, so just click on Start - and because this is a Windows 11 image, Rufus detects that, and it has some built in tools for kind of bypassing some of Microsoft’s limitations built into Windows 11, if you like.
So we can just leave all of these enabled, remove the requirement for 4GB of RAM, Secure Boot, and TPM 2.0 - we do have more than 4GB of RAM, but We don’t have these other things. The online account, all that stuff, I don’t really need any of that. Regional options, of course, I’m using UK English here - and of course, we don’t want data collection or device encryption.
So just click on OK.
This is just telling us that the UEFI bootloader has been revoked - this is just a slightly older image, but really not a problem so I’ll just click on OK - and then we click on yes.
Yes again. There we go - and this will wipe the USB drive, so yeah, you need something that you don’t mind wiping of course, because this is just going to replace the entire contents of the drive with this installation image and the modifications that it needs to make it work, and hopefully this shouldn’t take too long!
But first, a quick word about this channel’s sponsor, PCBWay.com. PCBWay is a PCB fabrication service that has been providing PCBs to this community for over 10 years now, and in that time they’ve built up quite the reputation for fast turnaround times and high quality - but did you know that they now also provide additional complementary services such as 3D printing, injection moulding and CNC machining? Well, if any of those are a requirement for your next project, please do check out their link in the description below - and a big thanks once again to PCBWay for supporting the channel. Now, back to the video.
Next up, there are some hardware changes that I want to make to this machine just to make our life a little bit easier. There’s nothing that’s really entirely necessary. Stuff like the Bluetooth and the onboard WiFi, the audio, everything else works perfectly fine in Windows 11 without needing to replace anything, so that is fantastic - but if we just take the side off here, if you remember the previous video, this machine has a Radeon 2600 XT graphics card in it, and that’s not really well supported under 11. It will kind of work using just a generic graphics driver, but of course we want a bit more than that - we want something a bit more modern, something accelerated, and something that’s really going to get the most out of this system so I have acquired a different card. Now this is a GTX 680 and this is actually fairly modern by this machine’s standards - so this supports stuff like DirectX 12 and all of the rest of it and it is compatible with the Intel Mac Pro, this very early generation of Intel Mac Pro - this is an Apple version of this card with the Apple firmware on it as well - so it’s just a straight swap for this, but of course, this does require external power - and we have these two external power connectors here - and for that, we need two proprietary cables, of course, because this is Apple we’re talking about - and there are two small six pin sockets on the motherboard, just towards the front here that this plugs into that then connect to this graphics card - so the other thing that I want to do is remove these original drives - it has mechanical hard drives in it - I’m actually going to be installing this to an SSD for now.
This is just a very basic Crucial 500GB SSD - but I’m not going to install this just yet because there is a little trick that I want to show you with this drive.
So we’ll look at that in a second. But first up, let’s get this graphics card installed.
Okay, back to our Windows laptop here, and the USB installation media has finished writing successfully so that’s all ready to go - and we also have our SSD here, which, as previously mentioned, I’m not quite ready to stick into the Mac yet, because I have another trick to show to you - and that trick involves this very laptop, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to flip it over, and we’re going to take it apart, and we’re going to install this SSD temporarily in here - and I will explain why in a moment…
So what we want here is our boot device selector, if you like, our boot menu - and there it is, which is F12 on this particular machine. Hopefully you can see what’s happening on the screen there - so we have legacy boot options here. Now, if you see a UEFI option, the stick hasn’t written correctly, but in our case it has and we want to select this option here, which is for the USB Storage Device so if I just select that, it takes a few minutes to get into the installer so we’ll do that straight away - and essentially what we’re going to do here is install Windows in MBR mode on this hard drive - basically get all of the installation files copied across onto the drive just by running through the process as normal on a separate machine here, one that we know the installation process actually works properly on, and then when it goes to reboot for the very first time, what we’re going to do is take this drive out and put it into the Mac - and the reason for this is because this Windows installer will not run on this Mac for whatever reason - I know some of them do but this specific one doesn’t and this is the easiest method that I found to get this to work.
So that took all of about five minutes and as you can see this is now automatically restarting so what I will do is just wait for this to do its thing.
Now the screen’s gone off, just hold down the power button until the power goes off - so we’ll just take our USB stick out, remove this hard drive, and stick it into one of the SATA ports in the Mac Pro.
…and I think we’ll just leave that dangling there for now. It’ll be fine.
So, with our hard drive installed, we can now kick off the next step of the installation process - so we just need to hold down the Alt key here, or the Option key if you prefer, if you’re a Mac person.
This should just take a few seconds and bong…
[bong]
Perfect timing - and hopefully we should see, there we go, so we have the hard drive icon up there on the screen - and we’ll just click on this - and hopefully that should launch us back into the Windows 11 installation process - and we can finish this off and yeah, there we go!
…and as mentioned, all of the hardware in this machine is just recognized pretty much straight off the bat by Windows 11 so as you can see, we have our little audio icon in the corner and it’s already checked for updates as well - so this is online, I have it connected to a wired network - so I just got the network cable plugged into the back and it all just works!
So of course, one thing that you will find during this installation process is that the machine will restart a few times - that’s perfectly natural, that’s perfectly normal for any Windows installation - and you will find yourself having to hold down ALT every single time. But there is a trick here - so what we can do is we can hold down CTRL, and as you can see, the icon changes, and then we just click on that, and that means that that becomes the default boot option in future, so every time this reboots in the future, it will automatically boot into that Windows installation.
…and here we are at the desktop, all up and running, just your bog standard Windows 11. Now, of course, it’s going to carry on downloading and installing some drivers and things in the background, including that NVIDIA driver for this graphics card so we will get full hardware acceleration with this graphics card under Windows 11. I just need to make sure that it finds the correct drivers for that and the NVIDIA Control Panel and everything else, but that’s pretty much all that we need to install.
[A little longer than a few minutes later…]
…and here we are, as predicted - so that’s Windows fully up to date, we have those graphics drivers installed as well. No input at all really on my part - I just kind of sat here and watched everything happen in the background. Of course, a couple of reboots as to be expected with Windows but yeah, now we are in a position to start actually installing stuff on this system - and the very first step that I always take with Windows 11 is to debloat it, of course, which is to run a script which removes all of the background cruft and the copilot AI stuff, some of the telemetry stuff and pre installed apps and things like that - so I won’t go into too much detail about what this is or how it works, but I will link to it down in the description if you’re interested in running it on your own system.
…and that means that we are now finally in a position to be able to install eXoDOS, that wonderful collection of old DOS games, but the trouble is we’re going to need some serious storage - alright, I used that 500GB SSD to install Windows and there is a bit of space left on that, and indeed there is a version of eXoDOS that basically grabs the games on demand as and when you run them, but I want everything installed on here - I want this to be offline, I want it to be self contained, and most importantly, I want it to be kind of an archive of all of these games as they currently stand - and for that, we are going to need some serious storage - so this is the solution that I have come up with: It’s a SABRENT NVMe to PCI Express adapter, and inside this enclosure here, with this lovely built in heatsink, is a 1TB Kingston NVMe drive.
Now not only will this add a lot of extra storage, but I also benchmarked this, and as you can see from the screenshots here, this is over 5 times as fast as that SSD that we’ve just added to the system!
Now, you’re probably sat there thinking, “But Rees, why didn’t you install Windows on this thing if it is that much faster? I mean, surely it would make a massive difference to the performance of the machine!” - and you would be absolutely right, of course, but the trouble is, the firmware in these old Macs doesn’t support booting from PCI Express drives - so we need to boot from a standard SATA drive, and then we can use this for storage once Windows is up and running - and yes, alright, I don’t really need this kind of performance just for DOS games, but hey, you have to admit, it is a very cool toy to have.
So eXoDOS itself is distributed in the form of torrents - so we have that full release, the 638GB bad boy, which is the one that I’m going to install on this NVMe drive. There’s a light release, which I mentioned before, which is 5GB, and that actually downloads and installs the games on demand if you don’t have the space or the bandwidth for it - and there’s also a media add-on pack, which I should say isn’t required to actually run the games, it’s a load of supplementary material - magazines and video documentaries and stuff like that from back in the day. It’s a really interesting collection, so we’re gonna need a torrent client. Now. In my case, I use Transmission - it’s very lightweight, it’s open source, it’s a really great project, and it just works!
So what I’m doing here is downloading the full release to that new NVMe drive, along with that media pack, and then I’m just also going to download the light release to the internal SSD as well, just in case there are any problems with the full release - I don’t foresee any problems but I’m going to have to leave this thing on all night downloading stuff anyway, so I may as well just grab everything.
Usually you would only need the full release or the light release, and like I say, if you are interested in that supplementary material and all of the historical stuff, definitely grab the media pack as well.
…and indeed here we are the very next day, everything has successfully finished downloading, so all that’s left is to run the setup batch file. Now, I’m very pleased to report that this is a very simple process - if you have the media pack you can drop it into the correct place and it will also deal with extracting all of that for you as well. But I’m not going to be doing that today, because once it’s all extracted, it’s actually bigger than the 1TB SSD that I’m installing this on so I’m going to have to skip that for now, which is a bit of a shame. But anyway, all you need to do is run the batch file, answer a few very simple questions, and it will just run through them, extracting everything.
Now, one thing that I should mention is that I did get an error relating to a missing DLL file called VCREDIST140.DLL - unfortunately I didn’t capture that on video - and to be honest, it’s probably because this is a very fresh, very raw install of Windows 11, but if you do get that, there is a link down in the description to the Visual C++ Redistributable, and you just install that and then it will run perfectly fine.
…and so with all of that setup done, we can now finally check out eXoDOS! Apologies for the over the shoulder shot by the way, but I can’t actually capture the screen on this while I’m running other stuff because it makes the fans run flat out so we’ll go with this, it’s fine.
So what is eXoDOS? Well, It’s a combination of a few different pieces of software: so the first thing that you will see is this launcher which is called LaunchBox, and there are plenty of other projects that use this, it’s its own standalone thing, and indeed this is the free version of LaunchBox - there’s also a paid version which adds some quite nifty features like a full screen mode that’s quite similar to Steam’s Big Picture Mode, if you’re familiar with that, and a few other niceties, so well worth supporting that if you do get into eXoDOS in a big way but no obligation, of course - and the other kind of major component of eXoDOS is DOSBox, that well known MS-DOS emulator for various other operating systems - and what this does is it packages all of these games up with their own configuration, and they’re all optimized to run as best as they possibly can in their own various different little DOSBox containers.
I mean, this thing is genius. But anyway- so we have box art here, and you can scroll through and pick your favorite game based on the art if you want, but what I would recommend, particularly on a slower system like this, if you have the full collection and everything else installed, it’s perhaps a little bit sluggish, it, you know, it probably gets better the more you use it and it caches stuff, but we have this list view here - so you can scroll through and you can find the games by name or release date or whatever else - and indeed on that note, there is an excellent filtering system here - so you can add stuff to your favourites list, you can filter by genre, max number of players, whether it’s multiplayer or single player, and indeed you can sort by rating.
You are asked during the installation process whether you want to show the adult games by the way - and of course I have because we’re all adults here - and then of course we have a category dropdown here as well, so you can sort by those as well, but perhaps the most useful thing is the search box here - so if we just type in one of my favourite DOS games of all time, Jazz Jackrabbit, and we’ll fire this up.
So this is literally just running the DOS version of the game in that DOSBox container, like I said, so exactly the same as it would be on a DOS machine. This has started up windowed, but literally just Alt-Enter to go full screen, as you always would, and we can choose SoundBlaster or Gravis Ultrasound. Now, I will say the sound isn’t very loud on this machine and apparently it’s quite a well known thing with Windows 11 and older audio hardware - I have no idea, it’s not something that I managed to get resolved in time - but…
…if you listen very carefully, it is working! So we can just go into the game, it runs full screen here, you are asked a few questions during the installation to do with scaling and that kind of thing, aspect ratio correction, and of course you can set those to your preferences. I have it so it’s running in the correct aspect ratio - and you can just go through and play any DOS game you could possibly think of!
I mean, how amazing is this!?
Oh, and I should add, of course, that this game notoriously supported gamepads back in the day, which is how I played it when it was new way back in - I don’t know, 1995 or whenever it was - and if you have a joystick or another USB input device, it will work with this, this is just DOSBox, so anything that works in DOSBox also works with eXoDOS!
…and what is a demo of DOS games without Doom, of course? And I just wanted to show off this little pane on the side with all of the information about the game because there’s just so much detailed information about the vast majority of these games - I mean, you’ve got different screenshots, you’ve got information on the developer, the publisher, the release date of course, it even keeps track of how many times you’ve started it, how much time you have spent playing that game in total - I mean this is really comprehensive stuff, it’s such a good project and if I just click on this, I can also demo another aspect of this.
This is actually a slightly different version of DOSbox, so this is the Community Edition, apparently - and yeah, essentially, eXoDOS uses different customized versions of DOSBox for various different games, depending on what is optimal for that game, and different configurations for each game as well - and not only that, but we have all of our different sound devices in here, and it supports all of those as well so if you want to know how Doom sounded on a Gravis Ultrasound or a Roland SoundCanvas, you can actually do that from within eXoDOS itself.
So yet again, the game fires up - it’s in windowed mode, Alt-Enter to go into full screen mode, we’ve got that aspect ratio correction on display again with those black bars at the side, which really absolutely doesn’t bother me at all because I would rather have the correct aspect ratio.
But yeah, it’s Doom! I mean, all right, I know there’s probably a million different ways to play Doom on a modern system, but there it is - that is eXoDOS and that is DOSBox - and there’s so much stuff that I haven’t covered in this video. Do go and check it out yourself, because this is really impressive stuff.
So there we have it! Practically every single DOS game ever made running under Windows 11 on a 17 year old Mac! I mean, I bet that wasn’t on your 2025 bingo card, was it? But seriously, eXoDOS is such a fantastic project and I highly urge you to go and check it out. It’s all completely free, It’s just a brilliant thing for game preservation so my hat is well and truly off to the developers - and of course, as with all of my videos, the links to everything that I’ve done are down in the description if you want to check it out yourself.
But that’s all I have for you for this video so a big thank you, as always, to my supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and my YouTube channel members, they get videos ad-free and a little bit early - and all that’s left is to say a big thank you to you for watching, and I’ll hopefully see you in the next one.
Original Video Links
Support The Channel:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ctrlaltrees
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ctrlaltrees
Become a Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe7aGwKsc40TYqDJfjggeKg/join
Episode Links:
eXoDOS: https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html
Part 1 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MjnLKEz_dg
Windows 11 Pentium 4 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKxvq-NeVC0
Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en
Windows 11 23H2 Image: https://archive.org/details/windows-11-english-international-23h2
Windows 11 Debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Transmission Torrent Client: https://transmissionbt.com
Visual C++ Redist: https://github.com/abbodi1406/vcredist/releases
LaunchBox: https://www.launchbox-app.com
DOSBox: https://www.dosbox.com/
Parts Used In This Video (Affiliate Links):
SABRENT PCIe to NVMe: https://geni.us/U3P5
1TB Kingston SSD: https://geni.us/jBdLV
AmazonBasics Computer Speakers: https://geni.us/BsRPcQ6
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