It's so easy these days to play old DOS games, it's great. Not just because of The Internet Archive's fantastic work in recent years with getting these onto their website, but also the work put in by the Dosbox and ScummVM people.
These old games are more accessible now than they were back in the day, when you had to configure your AUTOEXEC.BAT, get all your IRQs in order and make sure you have enough memory and whatnot.
The accessibility and availability of this stuff is one of the reasons why we started DOS Game Club a few years ago over on https://dosgameclub.com - it's like a book club, but instead of books we focus on a different DOS game every month and discuss it on our forums as we're playing them. At the end of the month we invite some members for a chat and publish it as a podcast.
Turns out there are loads of people interested in playing these old games, some of them quite young too! And with how many games are available all over the place, it looks like we'll have plenty of material to keep us busy for many years to come.
Stunts was so good. Ran it on my 1MB 386. You could record games and play them back from different angles.
You could design your own tracks and I remember finding a glitch if you raced the indycar at top speed towards the biggest ramp where it would fly into the air and be bound only by the top of the coordinate system. Great times (and I don't even like car games...)
What REALLY blew my mind is when I found that there were third-party editors that allowed you to build regular roads on water... but they would break as soon as you tried to open them in the built-in editor. Some custom-made tracks also made the game glitch by only showing some obstacles once you were basically one grid coordinate away (e.g. slalom obstacle would be invisible just until the moment you are about to hit it...). Fun times!
Edit: Also took me YEARS to figure out that you could edit your own terrain with Shift+F1!
Frontier: First Encounters but no Fronter: Elite II also puzzling. Not sure I've had a computer in the least 30 years without Wing Commander or Elite II installed (or Wizardry VII, or Civ, or Daggerfall, or, or, or...)
In my limited experience, it has been easier to get a good bunch of conventional memory available in DOSBox (and out of the box -- no pun intended) than it was in MS-DOS.
A freshly "booted" session seems to show 632k free right now. I can't remember ever getting that much free on MS-DOS, although my configs probably included cd-rom drivers and whatnot.
Agree wholeheartedly, I recently came across a piece of graph paper in an old box with the systems and price histories for trading. The Righteous Fire add-on storyline was probably the best.
I wrote my own AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS menu to select the right config and sometimes run a different .BAT file again. Still have a version of it and pulled it up for nostalgia: Colonization, Warcraft, Doom2 (single and network modes) and SC 2000 were other options I had setup.
I can't quite remember how those things were figured out either, but I think it was probably partially word of mouth. Games also had tips for memory configuration in their readme files or manuals. There was also at least one book I had at home that my father had bought that had all kinds of details on the workings of DOS (and PCs of that era in general).
I used to spend a bit of time browsing Computer & Game magazines at the local newsagency and library. I think some of what I picked up came from the likes of PCMag, C+VG and a lot of trial and error.
was not a fan of the gameplay modification they made in the remake, but with the addition of the fan made mod "The Authentic Colonization" it's much close to the original.
There is a link between these games that means a faithful update isn't possible. Both involve slavery. In both, the player can actively trade human lives, including the capture of slaves. Even in Colonization, where such depiction may be historically accurate, it is just too sensitive an area.
Wonderful. Doesn't look like the mute button is working in Firefox though. I currently have the eggceptional midi sounds through my speakers and I can't turn it down or off. (Magicland Dizzy)
Not for games and other user facing software. Development effort is finite and the extra complexity that users (reasonably) now expect is worth more than another 10% performance.
The places where it has made economic sense for me to optimise has been high volume consumer electronics. In those cases, taking up a bit less code space means you can drop to a smaller sized flash part and save 30 cents on a $20 bill of materials (for example).
Oh hell, I can run StarFlight (warning you must select EGA)? I haven't had a computer that could do that in years and I still have the original disks and more.
Being a young adult in the 80s and 90s was so magical for all the games that appeared. While seeing some again strips away the illusion I maintained of some of them looking and being better than they were the experience to revisit them again is well worth any slight correction to my memories
Standalone emulators are continuing to make progress for each of these platforms, but there's still quite some way to go. Once we get those to a level where most games are playable without issues at full speed porting them to the browser would theoretically be possible (no idea about the speed hits though), though I don't expect that to happen for several more years.
As for the Internet Archive itself, they recently set up their Internet Arcade: Turbo Edition [1], a collection of arcade games from the 90s and early 00s that cover the most demanding emulated games playable in the browser on the site (apart from Dottori-kun, of course).
>Or if they'll be long unplayable either technically or legally.
Technical isn't usually a problem, as cracks and emulators already exist.
Legality is a problem in theory, but in practice it seems it is just ignored? Actually, what explanation does the Internet Archive have for any of this being legal?
That gets them around the "prohibition on circumvention of access controls". I still don't understand how they can then go and distribute the programs without violating copyright. In fact, I'm still pretty certain they are violating copyright.
Copyright sucks, and I applaud them for what they are doing, but I don't see how any of this is legal.
20 years ago I would have considered the idea of being able to play every dos game ever made directly in a browser without waiting science fiction.
I guess it will happen eventually; I think the biggest concern with preserving games now is the amount of functionality provided server side that is lost (maybe forever) when the game company switches their servers off.
While that may be true (looking at the history of other games) you can also pretty much count on somebody reversing the server side and putting up a reverse engineered server then.
Currently PS3 emulator is good to go. On latest CPU's like Ryzen 9 you get even better FPS than on an original PS3 system. Also you can play it on 4K. Last of Us (2013) is playable at 50 FPS upscaled to 4K. I suspect in 5 to 7 years a PS4 emulator would do the same.
Is it really emulating though or just doing some kind of lightweight conversion that can run natively on x86? Because a cycle accurate SNES emulator still lags for me on certain games even on a Ryzen 7.
Earlier games were written to the bare metal, so copying the hardware was the hard part. More recent stuff is written to APIs, so you can avoid most of that, but the addition of 3D and more complexity means it’s just difficult in a different way.
...and there would also have to be another huge jump in (mainly single-threaded) computing power to make emulation at native speeds possible in a browser. Those consoles have relatively powerful GPUs and CPUs.
GPU pass through makes a huge difference in running games in a VM. AFAIK current gen consoles are mostly PCs-in-a-box, I am hopeful for the future of emulating them.
Everyone has their set of formative games. Mine would probably include:
- Civilization (the original). I can literally remember waking up at noon and just starting to play the game and then looking up and it was dark outside;
- Zork
- Prince of Persia (the original); and
- ... Bandit Kings of Ancient China
I literally had 20+ hour playing sessions of BKoAC. Like I even played this multiplayer (hot chair). I can remember getting to the point where me and my friend had split the map pretty much and he decided to attack me. I basically held a defensive line along a river and used magic to break the offensive line. It was one of my earlier experience with tactics.
I'm just curious since many people mentioned BKoAC, are any of Koei's new(er) strategy games popular in Western countries? Like games from the Nobunaga's Ambition series or Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. (Admittedly I don't know if they're translated into Western languages or not.)
I saw the title and came here to post this. Here's the direct link[1]. I spent an absurd amount of time playing this game at my brother's house because he had a PC and my family had a Mac. Empire[2] was another one that got plenty of play.
Technically I played the Macintosh version, but Mavis Beacon[0] was one of the first games I'd played in elementary school. I've recently wanted to try and raise my typing speed to 100+ wpm -- my current speed is ~80 wpm on a good day -- and TypeRacer[1]'s font and color choices sometimes make the practice texts hard to read. I should give good old Mavis Beacon a try...
Ha! I'm immediately thrown off by the double-space-after-period default. Fortunately that can be changed.
This really made my day! Being able to play "Lode Runner: The Legend Returns"[1] brings back so many memories from the time I played it on a Windows 95 machine.
Amazing how good and smooth The Internet Archive has made this work!
Performance in js-dos is really great. I was actually curious about developing (4K) dos programs in 2020. And the best out there is compile with gcc and pray ;)
You can download the games directly from archive.org[1], get a DOS emulator from the app store, and run those games slightly more natively than with a browser.
[1] Curiously only some of them, I suppose due to some licensing restrictions?
Wow, I didn't know this existed. I had the itch to play some of the games of my childhood a while ago (mostly roguelikes and interactive text adventures), but was too lazy to set up Dosbox. To be able to run them from my browser is just great.
Bummed that a lot of the games I want to play are hidden behind 'Decoders' or special key decoding systems that used to physically ship with the game. Anyone know a way around these kinda things?
This is really really nice, but I see some liabilities waiting to blow up here... How's Nintendo going to react to "Super Mario World DX" (an indie "cover" of SMW) for example?
They did not react well the first time they saw it. This project has been around for awhile. So maybe they just have not seen it yet? If I remember correctly that game was the one that morphed into giana sisters? Which is a cool game in its own right. The remake from a few years ago is decent.
Have to mess with this emu later. eXeDOS the project this thing is based on uses 6 different dosbox branches to get its compat with all the games working. This seems to be using 1? Which gets you most of them but about 200 or so will act oddly.
These old games are more accessible now than they were back in the day, when you had to configure your AUTOEXEC.BAT, get all your IRQs in order and make sure you have enough memory and whatnot.
The accessibility and availability of this stuff is one of the reasons why we started DOS Game Club a few years ago over on https://dosgameclub.com - it's like a book club, but instead of books we focus on a different DOS game every month and discuss it on our forums as we're playing them. At the end of the month we invite some members for a chat and publish it as a podcast.
Turns out there are loads of people interested in playing these old games, some of them quite young too! And with how many games are available all over the place, it looks like we'll have plenty of material to keep us busy for many years to come.