7k MS-DOS Games playable in the browser (opens in new tab)

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.

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...)

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.

I raise you HoMM3

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.

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

Privateer was amazing too.

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.

Try right clicking the tab and pressing Mute there.

Yeah, mute button not working in Chrome either.

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).

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

>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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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?

Bluetooth keyboard?

Or try this?

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

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

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.

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.

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!