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.<p>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.<p>The accessibility and availability of this stuff is one of the reasons why we started DOS Game Club a few years ago over on <a href="https://dosgameclub.com" rel="nofollow">https://dosgameclub.com</a> - 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.<p>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.<p>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...)
This is part of a larger group:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary</a><p>137k+ games for many software platforms including the ones for MS_DOS.
Woot! Sid Meier's Colonization is there. Hands down one of the best games of all time.<p>Wing Commander II collection, but no Privateer? That game is why Star Citizen even exists.
Back in the 80s, the two programs you ran on a PC clone to confirm if it REALLY was an IBM PC compatible was Lotus 123 and Flight Simulator.<p>You can now run Flight Simulator in a freakin' browser:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_v3.0_1988" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator...</a>
Alot of these games have been rebooted by various startups as mobile and web games with in app purchases and weird business models like "pay to win".<p>You could just grab an emulator and run the original and get everything for free.
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)
Spent hours playing Apache comanche game back in the days (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA</a>). It ran on a 4MB RAM machine just fine.<p>I wonder if we ever get back to this kind of efficient use of computers?
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.<p>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
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...<p>Ha! I'm immediately thrown off by the double-space-after-period default. Fortunately that can be changed.<p>[0] <a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typing_1987" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typin...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://play.typeracer.com/" rel="nofollow">https://play.typeracer.com/</a>
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.<p>Amazing how good and smooth The Internet Archive has made this work!<p>[1] <a href="https://archive.org/details/LodeRunnerTheLegendReturns" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/LodeRunnerTheLegendReturns</a>
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 ;)<p>MSDOS Development With GCC<p><a href="https://hackaday.com/2018/05/14/msdos-development-with-gcc/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2018/05/14/msdos-development-with-gcc/</a>
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.
Played this one <a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wacky_Wheels_1994" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wacky_Wheels_1994</a> over years on Win98 machine.<p>Lovely game.
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?
dosbox-staging is the active fork: <a href="https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging</a>
<p><pre><code> Game File (1 of 1) (3%; 15.1 MiB of 450.2 MiB)
</code></pre>
Sadly they are still straight up downloading whole ISOs instead of implementing some kind of virtual file system.