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7k MS-DOS Games playable in the browser
- arriu 6y agoAny way to get these working on mobile? The emulator seems to play but no way to type or input text.
- jandrese 6y agoBluetooth keyboard? Or try this? https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28045/is-there-any-way-to-manually-bring-up-the-keyboard https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28045/is-there-a...
- as-j 6y agoTried a real keyboard with no luck on an iPad. :( Sucks, was excited to try some games. :/
- chmod775 6y agoYou 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?
- thom 6y agoThings like Magic DosBox exist on Android, which offers a keyboard overlay.
- georgeecollins 6y agoI strongly recommend Bandit Kings of Ancient China. It is a great game.
- User23 6y agoI 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_China_1989 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Bandit_Kings_of_Ancient_Ch... [2] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Empire_1985 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Empire_1985
- reitzensteinm 6y agoEmpire is written by our own Walter Bright, more famous these days for the D language. Small world.
- georgeecollins 6y agoIt is amazing how those strategy games hold up.
- cletus 6y agoEveryone 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.
- fireattack 6y agoI'm just curious since many people mentioned BKoAC, are any of Koei's new(er) strategy games popular in Western countries? Like games from the Nobunaga's Ambition series or Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. (Admittedly I don't know if they're translated into Western languages or not.)
- justnotworthit 6y agoI wonder if something like this will ever happen to xbox 360, ps4, etc games. Or if they'll be long unplayable either technically or legally.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoIt will take a lot of effort to reverse-engineer and then emulate whatever backend these consoles have. 90's games were simple, very simple.
- userbinator 6y ago...and there would also have to be another huge jump in (mainly single-threaded) computing power to make emulation at native speeds possible in a browser. Those consoles have relatively powerful GPUs and CPUs.
- rangibaby 6y agoGPU pass through makes a huge difference in running games in a VM. AFAIK current gen consoles are mostly PCs-in-a-box, I am hopeful for the future of emulating them.
- BearOso 6y agoEarlier games were written to the bare metal, so copying the hardware was the hard part. More recent stuff is written to APIs, so you can avoid most of that, but the addition of 3D and more complexity means it’s just difficult in a different way.
- rangibaby 6y ago20 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.
- sandworm101 6y agoWoot! Sid Meier's Colonization is there. Hands down one of the best games of all time. Wing Commander II collection, but no Privateer? That game is why Star Citizen even exists.
- thom 6y agoFrontier: 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...)
- aik 6y agoAgreed! Love Colonization. Wish there was a remake. First game I thought of when seeing this list. Privateer was amazing too.
- vanderZwan 6y agoThere is a Civ IV-based remake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization
- bmn__ 6y agohttp://www.freecol.org/ http://www.freecol.org/
- sandworm101 6y ago
- cowmix 6y agoBack in the 80s, the two programs you ran on a PC clone to confirm if it REALLY was an IBM PC compatible was Lotus 123 and Flight Simulator. You can now run Flight Simulator in a freakin' browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_v3.0_1988 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Microsoft_Flight_Simulator...
- s-macke 6y agoThen you might be interested in https://github.com/s-macke/FSHistory 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.
- arbuge 6y agoThis is part of a larger group: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary 137k+ games for many software platforms including the ones for MS_DOS.
- aussieguy1234 6y agoAlot of these games have been rebooted by various startups as mobile and web games with in app purchases and weird business models like "pay to win". You could just grab an emulator and run the original and get everything for free.
- quickthrower2 6y agoDigger! I found you again!
- jose-cl 6y agoalley cat <3
- shmerl 6y agodosbox-staging is the active fork: https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 6y agoTechnically I played the Macintosh version, but Mavis Beacon[0] was one of the first games I'd played in elementary school. I've recently wanted to try and raise my typing speed to 100+ wpm -- my current speed is ~80 wpm on a good day -- and TypeRacer[1]'s font and color choices sometimes make the practice texts hard to read. I should give good old Mavis Beacon a try... Ha! I'm immediately thrown off by the double-space-after-period default. Fortunately that can be changed. [0] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typing_1987 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typin... [1] https://play.typeracer.com/ https://play.typeracer.com/
- 3np 6y agoThis is really really nice, but I see some liabilities waiting to blow up here... How's Nintendo going to react to "Super Mario World DX" (an indie "cover" of SMW) for example?
- sumtechguy 6y agoThey 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.
- beilabs 6y agoWonderful. Doesn't look like the mute button is working in Firefox though. I currently have the eggceptional midi sounds through my speakers and I can't turn it down or off. (Magicland Dizzy)
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoTry right clicking the tab and pressing Mute there.
- EvanKnowles 6y agoYeah, mute button not working in Chrome either.
- jp42 6y agoDangerous Dave! I vividly remember playing this for hours on Windows 95
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway7281 6y agoSpent hours playing Apache comanche game back in the days (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcxgYEBAXA). It ran on a 4MB RAM machine just fine. I wonder if we ever get back to this kind of efficient use of computers?
- rkangel 6y agoNot 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).
- wilsonrocks 6y agoStunts was so good. Ran it on my 1MB 386. You could record games and play them back from different angles. You could design your own tracks and I remember finding a glitch if you raced the indycar at top speed towards the biggest ramp where it would fly into the air and be bound only by the top of the coordinate system. Great times (and I don't even like car games...)
- TonyTrapp 6y agoWhat 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!
- fb03 6y agoI love stunts so much I did a song using only dosbox recorded stunts wave files as samples. https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/stunts https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/stunts also check out the song's pixel artwork, a remix of the main game screen.
- zorbash 6y agoPlaying Jazz Jackrabbit in the browser just made my day.
- Shivetya 6y agoOh hell, I can run StarFlight (warning you must select EGA)? I haven't had a computer that could do that in years and I still have the original disks and more. Being a young adult in the 80s and 90s was so magical for all the games that appeared. While seeing some again strips away the illusion I maintained of some of them looking and being better than they were the experience to revisit them again is well worth any slight correction to my memories
- benibela 6y agoAscendancy was great, colonizing planets and building a space empire But you need to get the version with improved AI or it is not challenging
- phaedrus 6y agoFinding SuperKarts in this collection takes me back to my childhood. It was a 3D racing game that ran smoothly on older computers.
- Dingen 6y agoIt's so easy these days to play old DOS games, it's great. Not just because of The Internet Archive's fantastic work in recent years with getting these onto their website, but also the work put in by the Dosbox and ScummVM people. These old games are more accessible now than they were back in the day, when you had to configure your AUTOEXEC.BAT, get all your IRQs in order and make sure you have enough memory and whatnot. The accessibility and availability of this stuff is one of the reasons why we started DOS Game Club a few years ago over on https://dosgameclub.com https://dosgameclub.com - it's like a book club, but instead of books we focus on a different DOS game every month and discuss it on our forums as we're playing them. At the end of the month we invite some members for a chat and publish it as a podcast. Turns out there are loads of people interested in playing these old games, some of them quite young too! And with how many games are available all over the place, it looks like we'll have plenty of material to keep us busy for many years to come.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoStreet Rod is an amazing game. Thanks for sharing this. I remember getting shareware disks at the local mall and spending hours trying to get games working as a kid. “Dad, what is a Fat32? I deleted Lotus Symphony to make room for Leisure Suit Larry...”
- ArtWomb 6y agoPerformance in js-dos is really great. I was actually curious about developing (4K) dos programs in 2020. And the best out there is compile with gcc and pray ;) MSDOS Development With GCC https://hackaday.com/2018/05/14/msdos-development-with-gcc/ https://hackaday.com/2018/05/14/msdos-development-with-gcc/
- marcAKAmarc 6y agoBummed that a lot of the games I want to play are hidden behind 'Decoders' or special key decoding systems that used to physically ship with the game. Anyone know a way around these kinda things?
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoAlmost all of those will have cheat sheets or reproductions or scans or even patches/cracks somewhere if the game had a big enough following.
- commonturtle 6y agoWow, I didn't know this existed. I had the itch to play some of the games of my childhood a while ago (mostly roguelikes and interactive text adventures), but was too lazy to set up Dosbox. To be able to run them from my browser is just great.
- moortaube 6y agoPlayed this one https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wacky_Wheels_1994 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Wacky_Wheels_1994 over years on Win98 machine. Lovely game.
- rasz 6y agoGame File (1 of 1) (3%; 15.1 MiB of 450.2 MiB) Sadly they are still straight up downloading whole ISOs instead of implementing some kind of virtual file system.
- mono-bob 6y agoThis really made my day! Being able to play "Lode Runner: The Legend Returns"[1] brings back so many memories from the time I played it on a Windows 95 machine. Amazing how good and smooth The Internet Archive has made this work! [1] https://archive.org/details/LodeRunnerTheLegendReturns https://archive.org/details/LodeRunnerTheLegendReturns
- Seb-C 6y agoThis is a great initiative and collection. However I am sad not to see Crusader: no remorse in the list. This was one of my favourites games.