DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems—primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games is widespread, with it being used in commercial re-releases of those games as well. DOSBox can be downloaded and used from the video game console emulator front-end RetroArch. Development Before Windows XP, consumer-oriented versions of Windows were based on MS-DOS. Windows 3.0 and its updates were operating environments that ran on top of MS-DOS, and the Windows 9x series consisted of operating systems that were still based on MS-DOS. These versions of Windows could run DOS applications. Conversely, the Windows NT operating systems were not based on DOS. A member of the series is Windows XP, which debuted on October 25, 2001, to become the first consumer-oriented version of Windows to not use DOS. Although Windows XP could emulate DOS, it could not run many of its applications, as those applications ran only in real mode to directly access the computer's hardware, and Windows XP's protected mode prevented such direct access for security reasons. MS-DOS continued to receive support until the end of 2001, and all support for any DOS-based Windows operating system ended on July 11, 2006. The development of DOSBox began around the launch of Windows 2000—a Windows NT system—when its creators, Dutch programmers Peter Veenstra and Sjoerd van der Berg, discovered that the operating system had dropped much of its support for DOS software. The two knew of solutions at the time, but they could not run the applications in windowed mode or scale the graphics. The project was first uploaded to SourceForge and released for beta testing on July 22, 2002. Features DOSBox is a command-line program, configured either by a set of command-line arguments or by editing a plain text configuration file. For ease of use, several graphical front ends have been developed by the user community. While the DOSBox project hopes that one day the emulator will run all programs ever made for the PC, the goal is not yet reached, and as of the latest version the primary focus has been on DOS gaming. The basic version does not support long filenames, most versions of DOS do not support them, and filenames must follow the 8.3 name.extension pattern: a maximum of 8 characters for the name and