7k MS-DOS Games playable in the browser | Hacker News Reader

7k MS-DOS Games playable in the browser

archive.org

337 pointstnr2382 comments

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!

I love stunts so much I did a song using only dosbox recorded stunts wave files as samples.

https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/stunts

also check out the song's pixel artwork, a remix of the main game screen.

This is part of a larger group:

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary

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.

Wing Commander II collection, but no Privateer? That game is why Star Citizen even exists.

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...)

Agreed! Love Colonization. Wish there was a remake. First game I thought of when seeing this list.

Privateer was amazing too.

There is a Civ IV-based remake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization

It's actually a pretty good remake. I liked both this and the original a lot back in the day.

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.

http://www.freecol.org/

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.

Privateer was so great. I also have some fond memories of it being one of the first games I “hacked” by editing the dialog with a hex editor.

Privateer was very tricky to run because it barely fit in 640k, and took a special config. I wonder if that makes it hard to emulate.

It was the best of the wing commander series by far.

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 did the same! Honestly don't remember how I figured all that stuff out without internet and stack overflow.

Also, my friends would call me and ask for the secret code to start Doom. I'd begin: "cd doom2"....

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).

The good old days of floppy disk swapping!

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.

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.

I raise you HoMM3

Heores of Might and Magic 3 was a windows release, the last game in the series playable on DOS was HoMM2.

My point was about "best games of all time". While Colonization is a good game, Heroes is the best in TBS games.

aha, but this is a thread about DOS games, which is why I got confused.

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.

You can now run Flight Simulator in a freakin' browser:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator...

Then you might be interested in

https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory

There you can play the Flight Simulators 1-4 in the browser. It is even playable on your mobile.

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".

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)

Try right clicking the tab and pressing Mute there.

Yeah, mute button not working in Chrome either.

Spent hours playing Apache comanche game back in the days (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA). It ran on a 4MB RAM machine just fine.

I wonder if we ever get back to this kind of efficient use of computers?

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

I wonder if something like this will ever happen to xbox 360, ps4, etc games. Or if they'll be long unplayable either technically or legally.

It will take a lot of effort to reverse-engineer and then emulate whatever backend these consoles have. 90's games were simple, very simple.

...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.

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.

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.

A great deal of online games of the Dreamcast era (so early 2000s) are being resurrected exactly through this method and people are enjoying them to this day: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/app.php/page/onlinegame...

I considered fan efforts etc, but things like the audio from BS Zelda relies on someone having saved it in the first place.

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).

[1] https://archive.org/details/internetarcadeturbo

> porting them to the browser would theoretically be possible

Even then I don't see it working in practice due to the bandwidth and storage requirements.

>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?

Their DMCA exemption granted by the Copyright Office.

https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

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.

They will take down content (and keep it archived meanwhile) if the original rightsholders complain.

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.

Well, have fun:

https://rpcs3.net/

It's a very real emulator, just nowhere near cycle accurate :)

I strongly recommend Bandit Kings of Ancient China. It is a great game.

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.

[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Bandit_Kings_of_Ancient_Ch...

[2] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Empire_1985

Empire is written by our own Walter Bright, more famous these days for the D language. Small world.

It is amazing how those strategy games hold up.

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 have such fond memories of that game.

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.)

Digger! I found you again!

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.

[0] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typin...

[1] https://play.typeracer.com/

Dangerous Dave! I vividly remember playing this for hours on Windows 95

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!

[1] https://archive.org/details/LodeRunnerTheLegendReturns

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 ;)

MSDOS Development With GCC

https://hackaday.com/2018/05/14/msdos-development-with-gcc/

Ascendancy was great, colonizing planets and building a space empire

But you need to get the version with improved AI or it is not challenging

Any way to get these working on mobile? The emulator seems to play but no way to type or input text.

Bluetooth keyboard?

Or try this?

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28045/is-there-a...

Tried a real keyboard with no luck on an iPad. :(

Sucks, was excited to try some games. :/

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?

Things like Magic DosBox exist on Android, which offers a keyboard overlay.

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 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wacky_Wheels_1994 over years on Win98 machine.

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?

Almost all of those will have cheat sheets or reproductions or scans or even patches/cracks somewhere if the game had a big enough following.

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.

dosbox-staging is the active fork: https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging

    Game File (1 of 1) (3%; 15.1 MiB of 450.2 MiB)

Sadly they are still straight up downloading whole ISOs instead of implementing some kind of virtual file system.

This is a great initiative and collection.

However I am sad not to see Crusader: no remorse in the list. This was one of my favourites games.

Playing Jazz Jackrabbit in the browser just made my day.

Finding SuperKarts in this collection takes me back to my childhood. It was a 3D racing game that ran smoothly on older computers.

alley cat <3

Oh, I loved that game as a child. I'm still amazed at how much is accomplished with so little

I played this all the time as a kid. Glad to see it again!

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