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>Of course you can’t save your games! They’re not some actual thing playing on your operating system. They live inside a window...But we got a lot of complaints
by kevan 11y ago
>Of course you can’t save your games! They’re not some actual thing playing on your operating system. They live inside a window...But we got a lot of complaints about it...So we fixed it.
Great example of usability winning out over technical purity here. Just because something is behaving as we expect it to doesn't mean it can't be changed to make the experience better for everyone.
- db48x 11y agoYour point isn't wrong, but there was no "technical purity" motivation for not implementing it from the start. It's just difficult to do well, so we only implemented the easy case (DosBox), and only the easiest of the easy cases (only one saved filesystem, no disk swapping, no ui, etc). It's the same as printing. Everyone writes hilarious complaints in the comments on the word processors about how printing didn't work. Of course you can't print! It's an emulator running in JS in your browser!!!1! But we have ideas for how to implement it, so maybe one day it will work after all. Saved games and networking are higher priority and are further along though.
- kevan 11y agoAh, I was assuming there would be a kludgy hack to bridge between the emulator's filesystem and localStorage on the browser.
- db48x 11y agoFear not, there are in fact some kludgy hacks in there. The BrowserFS stuff is really clean though, and since DosBox is written in C and uses the normal POSIX file api (DosBox thinks it was compiled for Linux), plugging the two together was pretty easy.