Pool of Radiance is mostly a turn-based game, but there are times when messages will only be displayed for a short interval. That is, you can play Pool of Radiance on a modern computer and be pretty well off, but if you don't want to miss anything, you should use a program like DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com/), which emulates an x86 computer.

If you use DOSBox, then you'll have to do one of two things when you play Pool of Radiance. You'll either have to ignore the part where they recommend you mount c to c:\oldgames (and just mount c to c:\), or you'll have to edit the pool.cfg file in the Pool of Radiance directory so that the directories shown there are correct for the mounting. For example, if your Pool of Radiance directory is c:\oldgames\poolrad and you mounted c to c:\oldgames, then you'll need to change the directories in pool.cfg to c:\poolrad. I'd recommend the former rather than the latter.