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I've discovered their efforts to archive old dos games... fully playable in the browser through a dosbox build in WASM as far as I know. That's a really impress
by tetha 7y ago
I've discovered their efforts to archive old dos games... fully playable in the browser through a dosbox build in WASM as far as I know. That's a really impressive cooperation of very old and very new technology - 16 bit up to the edge of JS (- edit: or rather, the edge of browser based computing).
And on that train of thought, I just had a little flashback about storage sizes. There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement, and some 50MB drive was huge. The classical example: Monkey Island, Indiana Jones or Day of the Tentacle on ~12 floppy disks. But you had to choose which 1 or 2 to install because you didn't have enough space on your hard drive, or you had to swap disks every few screens :)
Or, they are archiving a lot of video playthroughs in the lets-play style from video sites, in case those sites go through a meltdown like viddler does.
I guess I'm rambling. Point is: This isn't just a storage dump. There are also interesting projects around the internet archive to make the old things accessible on new systems. Very worthwhile donating to.
- fyp 7y agoI relived a part of my childhood by playing Chip's Challenge again the other day: https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoNote that you can buy Chip's Challenge 1, 2, and Chuck's Challenge 3D from the guy who originally created it. https://store.steampowered.com/developer/niffler https://store.steampowered.com/developer/niffler
- acomjean 7y agoThere is an interesting podcast with a "Chuck" Somerville interview. He started on the Apple ][. Its pretty fun walk through the industry in the 80s, and touches on getting the "Chips Challenge" name back from the group that bought it. http://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/apple-time-warp-podcast-episode-2-editedm4a http://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/apple-time-warp-podcast-epis...
- jvm_ 7y agoThanks, just played Xonix for the first time in a while. The other dos boxes I've found were too fast to actually play. https://archive.org/details/msdos_Xonix_1984 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Xonix_1984
- db48x 7y agoIt's not quite limited to small files. Give https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dragons_Lair_1993_1993 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dragons_Lair_1993_1993 a try :)
- theandrewbailey 7y ago> There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement I don't know what storage medium that refers to. Plain old 3.5" floppies only went up to 1.44 MB.
- SamBam 7y agoYou know how old computers always rounded things to the nearest pi...
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y agoGet out of here. (Still sore Apple did not stick to the 1kB = 1000 bytes of the original MacOS and gave in to the "powers of two" insanity ;-)
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoYeah that was great - you could not actually represent real computer resources correctly without 4 decimal places.
- saagarjha 7y agoWhen was the last time you bought something that gave you exactly 1073741824 bytes to the gigabyte on the box?
- colejohnson66 7y agoA RAM module?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI do embedded a lot. Everything is powers of two.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
- elweston2 7y agoMost of that effort to archive games is not IA. It is from 2 other groups who sometimes work with IA if they all are not fighting. Specifically one group is the one going through all of them and configuring them to work correctly in DOSBox. Another is just going through and just cataloging them. Getting the metadata on that stuff is kind of tough now. Like what was the exact date a game came out on? Does it have artwork still? Is there some odd protection scheme going on? Is there an IMG file for the disks? Or is it just some random pile of files? Can you get a copy from ebay? etc etc etc. IA typically notes who is doing the archive work. IA also respects takedown notices for these games. As many of them sort of came back from the dead and are sold again, or the company just does not want its IP on some random site. A good portion though no one really knows who owns them anymore. Some have clear lineage. Some have been sold over and over to random companies and depending on contracts no one knows. That 'scene' is also full of drama and very insular. Donate to IA to help them build better infrastructure and better search. But donating because they host old abandoned DOS games I would not call a good reason, and misplaced. Because the people doing the majority of the work are doing it because they like it, not money. IA does have some work around that such as getting dosbox and mame running in a browser. Just be clear on what you are donating to.