DOSBox ported to run in Chrome via Native Client. Some games hosted too. | Hacker News Reader

DOSBox ported to run in Chrome via Native Client. Some games hosted too.

naclbox.com

78 pointsk00k16 comments

It's nice, but the porter didn't publish the source code (DOSBox is GPLed) and has adds splattered on every page of his site :-/.

Publishing the source wouldn't have hurt his income and would have prevented some bad advertising.

Yeah, I don't think the old loophole of running GPL'ed code on your server would apply here since DOSBox would be downloaded and executed in the browser. He has to release the source.

Furthermore, he didn't just adapt the build scripts. The game files are not mounted from a discreet disk image, he made a hack to get them available from the DOSBox internal Z: drive (which isn't actually a disk image but the interface to internal functions).

I love that you tracked this down. I was definitely "pragmatic" when working on this port.

The source code is available on the about page now. The direct link is here: http://nacl.naclbox.com/naclbox_patch.zip

Incidentally, I had to explain to my wife why I had to jump on the computer immediately when getting home from work and I never thought I would see the day when I would be chastised by my wife over a GPL violation. :)

The DOSBox folks and the Google engineers working on Native Client are geniuses. By comparison, my C++ skills are only slightly more sophisticated than the monkeys you see throwing poo at the zoo. :)

Take a look at what I hacked together. I had a lot of fun working on it over the last couple of weeks.

Oh, one more thing. My goal with the site is to share the port and be able to pay the bandwidth bills hosting the demos. It's definitely not my day job. :)

I am working on posting the source code to the site now.

Cool, thank you :-)

I can't seem to make this work. I'm on Chrome 12 on Win7 and I enabled Native Client in about:flags and restarted... Still see "Missing plug-in." Will try on Linux...

Same here on 13.0.761.0 (84610). Not sure.

Same for me on Chrome 12 Mac. I had Chrome 11 on a Win7x64 box which worked.

You have to enable it in about:plugins too.

Bingo! This did it. Thanks.

In Chrome 12.0.742.30, I get this error in my console,

> NaCl module proxy failed: could not initialize module.

awesome...I actually just downloaded Dosbox yesterday and was enjoying massive waves of nostalgia playing Super Solvers: Gizmos and Gadgets.

(Incidentally anyone with nerdy kids should check out the Suprer Solvers games ASAP)

@dragmorp_ youre missing a www DNS entry, fyi

Reply on news.ycombinator.com