If you try to run California Games (1987) in DOSBox o in other emulators like IBMulator or PCem, you will see that the keyboard doesn’t work at all, so you can’t play as you couldn’t pass the “enter your name” screen.
That’s because this particular game supports only standard (at the time) keyboards, not extended keyboards. (Right now all the keyboards we use are extended)
MS-DOS, since version 5.0, has a command to insert in config.sys to simulate a standard keyboard with an extended keyboard:
SWITCHES /K
With this, the game will recognize your keyboard. Video (I totally suck at this game):
Be careful: a “standard” keyboard doesn’t have the function keys (F1, F2, and so on), so if you insert this command in the config.sys you could have problems with other games/programs. If that’s the case, it’s better to create a boot disk only for California Games (that already has a big memory bug, it won’t start if too much standard memory is available)
If you use DOSBox instead of a full PC emulator, you have to boot from that DOS in order to let it see the command. Assuming you have a working install of DOS 5.0 or higher on c: , you have to run it with:
boot -l c