Em-DOSBox is incredible. I'd previously wondered if it might be possible to run DOSBox in the browser with emscripten, but there seemed to be nothing working out there. Then the Internet Archive started hosting DOS games, and I wondered what they were using, thus I found Em-DOSBox.<p>At the same time, I was getting a bit of nostalgia for Windows 95, the first upgrade to Windows I ever used. And it turns out with a bit of fiddling you can run Windows 95 in DOSBox and have it mostly work.<p>Thus <a href="http://win95.ajf.me/" rel="nofollow">http://win95.ajf.me/</a> was born. Windows 95 running in the browser. It's still rather unbelievable. You can listen to CANYON.MID on an emulated Sound Blaster 16!<p>(Unlike the Internet Archive's games, this doesn't do any saving to local storage, sorry. I'm not sure it practically could, because it's not using a fake filesystem mapped to fopen() calls by intercepting DOS system calls, as DOSBox typically does, but rather DOSBox is giving Windows 95 a real disk image, so you'd have to stuff 131MB into localStorage.)
Something that most emulators have failed to achieve (and that the Start9 project[1] aims to fix) is the user experience. It's great to have a working emulator, but it's even better to have an emulator that doesn't have a learning curve bigger than the everest. It won't work if we ask our users to download things from the internet (often from third-party websites), especially if they're shipped with adwares (as it happens with some official emulators), or require third-party plugins (remember EPSX?), or don't have any easy screen sharing features, or ... Things like what the article is about are a small step in the right direction.<p>[1] <a href="http://start9.io" rel="nofollow">http://start9.io</a>
>Of course you can’t save your games! They’re not some actual thing playing on your operating system. They live inside a window...But we got a lot of complaints about it...So we fixed it.<p>Great example of usability winning out over technical purity here. Just because something is behaving as we expect it to doesn't mean it can't be changed to make the experience better for everyone.
Maybe I'm not enough into the details, but from my perspective it seems as it should be very normal to save things in an emulator. It should not just be possible by default it should be much better than in the original, since we control how we set up the emulator. E.g. I would expect a game that had 3 saving slots to have 1 mio now. I would expect that these files would be stored in my host file system in a way that I can back it up and sync it via dropbox and github. Is that really that uncommon?<p>I mean, there are people who hack games that should not be modified and change the userinterface etc. We should have enough control over our virtual machines to let them do anything.
The comment in TFA about exporting the saved game data via URL is a great idea. Imagine being able to send someone to a specific point in a videogame by URL or share an old Wordperfect document, including the content, via a huge URL.