I also have an instant-run port of Cave Story: https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/. For that one I added cloud save game sync too. Porting classic games to the web is a fun hobby!
Coming up with touchscreen control schemes for these old games is probably the most interesting part. I really like the controls I came up with for both games. For Quake I determined that you really need automatic shooting for touch controls to feel good, but a naive implementation of an automatic trigger makes the railgun into a win button, so I did something a little more complex that I think is fun to use and not unfair. Cave Story was also challenging; at first I wasn't sure I could make a touch control scheme that would be good enough to beat the game, but with the final scheme I was able to play all the way through (at least to the first ending) purely on touch controls. And you can use the cloud save sync to transfer your save game to a PC for the hard parts if you need to.
On a Pentium 75 it can get 30fps and with decoupling the frame timer it plays at the same speed as the original. The port offloads the Organya synth soundtrack to MIDI to improve performance, and also sounds amazing.
Still working on a few bug fixes, performance tweaks, and Waveblaster support, but it's playable.
One thing I will say is that this so far has NAILED the experience I remember of loading the game. Thinking the PC had frozen, only to finally be greeted with that gorgeous Maxis loading screen and opening animation.
I have not yet determined if the sim speed goes nutso on Cheetah like I remember, but I will edit this when I do.
Coming back to edit and say that this is absolutely unusable, either due to demand or underspecced VMs. I cannot get through laying infrastructure without the entire emulation freezing hard and forcing me to reload the page.
Coming back again to report that I have been trying for an hour and a half to just get past the city creation stage of the game. I can only get to the point of laying infrastructure in 1/10 attempts and I lose all progress every time because I can't save before it crashes. This is woefully underpowered for a simple simulation game, I c a n n o t i m a g i n e h o w s l o w i t i s f o r a n y f p s o r r a c i n g g a m e.
While many people would likely justify their piracy with the idea that "The people who made it don't receive that money" - that isn't always true, and even then they did get the cash from selling the rights.
It's not as it playing that one specific game is a human right, after all.
It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them, seeing people that are wishing to spend hours on a game, but not to pay the rightholders the equivalent of 5-10 minutes of average SWE salary.
The whole copyright system needs a huge overhaul as it is taking away the ability to share what is the art and creation forms of today.
Some windows games will run under the hx extender.
I used it quite successfully for an official sequel to an old DOS game a few weeks ago, and it even got to the point where it was pretty trivial to patch the js-dos ZIP bundle on the fly to modify how the original DOS game worked.
You can even get an extremely cool boxed version: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RetroeXo
I keep minimal ExoDOS, MAME and RetroArch installs on my laptop so when I'm reading a retro article about some cool game I've never heard of (or only vaguely remember) it's easy to download the game files and give it a go. Frankly, retro emulation has gotten so incredible lately with upscaling, 4K texture packs, mods, decomps/recomps and fan translations of Japan-only titles - it's been 18 months since I played a game released in the last decade. Currently, I'm halfway through the best late-90s Japanese shmups. Next up I have 126 PS3/X360 titles curated from top ten lists on my backlog.
Also, it is a riot seeing AoE2 on there; I just finished getting my ass kicked in a 3v3. Got tower dropped and never recovered while my teammates tried to carry.
