13 ms·
Run old games in DOSBox in the browser
- mirrorskin 15y agoLooks interesting, but after activating Native Client, I just see a black box in Chrome 15.0.849.1 dev on OS X 10.6.8 – anybody else has that issue? Or do the games only work on Windows?
- Cushman 15y agoSame here. Chrome 13, OS X 10.7.
- buster 15y agoThey run at least on Linux 64 Bit.
- jessexoc 15y agoSimilar issue here on Ubuntu 10.10 64bit: Chrome - 14.0.835.15 dev Chromium - 14.0.803.0 (Developer Build 90483 Linux) Ubuntu 10.10 I am getting a 403 when trying to load the dosbox client (http://nacl.naclbox.com/dosbox_14.nmf http://nacl.naclbox.com/dosbox_14.nmf). I wonder the server is refusing this request if the user-agent is not in their white list? Or perhaps they are limiting it based on Country due to Copyright Issues?
- jbri 15y agoI also get a 403 trying to load what you've linked, but dosbox_13.nmf loads fine and so do the games. It determines the filename based on the major version number in the useragent - it would probably work fine if your browser reported chrome 13.something.
- zerd 15y agoWorks on 64bit OSX, Chrome 13.0.782.112
- vmind 15y agoLooks like the dosbox is loaded depending on which version of chrome you're running, and there's only 12 and 13 up, so 14/15 tries to get a file that doesn't exist. Bit of silly coding, given the ABI is fixed from 13 onwards.
- shrikant 15y agoI was on 14.0.835.2 (Win7) and had a similar issue (black box, and very laggy scrolling). Once the GPU compositing and GPU accelerated drawing options marked out here [1] are disabled, the issues went away. [1] http://i.imgur.com/COxPY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/COxPY.jpg
- cool-RR 15y agoTotally awesome. Though I kinda wonder, why Simon the Sorcerer, that used to run on a 386, now takes 100% of a processor core of a Core 2 Duo.
- nolok 15y agoYou have to realize that not only are performances of nacl probably going to improve with time, but more importantly this is not a port of the game in nacl, this is a port of the game, running in the dosbox emulator running in nacl (Dosbox emulate a whole old computer, which then load the game). Redoing such a game from scartcg in Nacl and getting rid of the emulator layer would have much better performances.
- zerd 15y agoAnother reason is explained on the website: "Currently NaClBox is using far more CPU than it should. This is because the current version of SDL for Native Client has a bug that will crash the browser when you navigate away from it. To avoid that, I had to revert back to an older version of the SDL port that has high CPU utilization."
- ootachi 15y agoThose insisting that there's no way this will be another ActiveX would be wise to notice this. We're not even one day into the release and already there's a browser-crashing bug.
- jerf 15y agoIn addition to the other points, it should be pointed out many games had busy loops in them. Such games will always take 100% of your processor, except in some cases where the busy loop crashes because it manages to count too high and overflow something or other such crash bugs.
- cturner 15y agoI have a poor understanding of the toolchain, as my next question may make clear. What obstacles would there be to running Borland C++ in this, and developing from here?
- 5h 15y agoso my morning went like 1) skim tech crunch article 2) figure it will take a while for anything interesting to come out 3) come back to HN, this is next story this will not be a productive morning
- buster 15y agoIf this isn't clear to someone: This needs Chrome and the Native Client. From the page: Please Note: You must have Native Client enabled in Chrome 12 or 13 for this game to work in your browser. To enable Native Client, do the following: Go to "about:flags" in your address bar (without quotes) Click "Enable" next to Native Client Go to "about:plugins" in your address bar (again, without quotes) Occasionally you will find that you have to click "Enable NaCl" here too Restart Chrome Have fun!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kleiba 15y ago...thus it would be nice to change the headline from "..in the browser" to "..in Chrome".
- leoc 15y agoIn the long term, it would be preferable to fix the browser.
- tyree732 15y agoPreferable for some, but many see NaCl as another ActiveX.
- novumordo 15y agoWhile NaCl poses security concerns, they have invested a lot of effort to make the sandbox secure. Their first two papers deal with this quite a bit [1,2] and the new paper seems to expand on this more, but I haven't read it yet [3]. ActiveX doesn't even compare -- it's just running native code. [1]http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarball/nacl/googleclient/native_client/documentation/nacl_paper.pdf http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/data/docs_tarba... [2]http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/NaCl_SFI.pdf http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/NaCl_SFI.pd... [3]http://naclports.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/experimental/v8/nacljit.pdf http://naclports.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/experimental/v... More about NaCl (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/) Portable NaCl (PNaCl) looked very promising (targeting LLVM (bytecode) and then re-targeting your native architecture) but I haven't heard anything about it lately.
- hannes2000 15y agoHas anybody gotten NaCL apps to work on 64bit Linux?
- angryasian 15y agoyep playing star wars : tie fighter right now chrome 13.0.782.112 Natty 11.04 64bit
- buster 15y agoI do. Running 13.0.782.112 beta Chrome on Natty 64bit. Edit: Chromium 13.0.782.107 works for me, too.
- ck2 15y agoNative client is a horribly bad idea on so many levels. Wiz-bang demos aren't enough to distract from the danger. Now trojans have one huge, lovely target. Just change browser settings and boom, easy attack. This in combination with hiding everything from users (status bar, url bar, etc.) is super dangerous. It's activex all over again. Do it in webgl or otherwise, leave native code execution outside the browser.
- jbri 15y agoIn what way is NaCl worse than webgl?
- jbk 15y agoActually it is better for security.
- gcr 15y agoProof please? Whenever I visit a WebGL demo inside Linux w/ NVidia drivers, if there are any complicated shaders, my system hard-freezes, forcing me to reboot. Until the X developers fix Xorg's security model (like that will happen), and until NVidia fixes their Linux drivers (like that will happen), WebGL will always be one massive gaping security and stability problem for me as a Linux user.
- jbk 15y agoSo, you are saying the same thing that I am :D
- iam 15y agoBecause it runs userspace code on x86, instead of running kernel-level code on the GPU?
- jbk 15y agoBecause we know, those days, to sandbox raw x86 code, and not let them access the system and the drivers... However, running shaders directly on the GPU exposes directly graphic drivers, that are not conceived to block unfriendly code.
- tybris 15y agoI was thinking flying cars and stuff. I didn't know the future was going to be this awesome.
- csl 15y agoSo, Native Client allows you to run out-of-process, sandboxed, _native_ code in Chrome. Does that mean that the server needs to serve precompiled executables to visitors with different operating systems?
- onedognight 15y agoThe code is OS independent, but processor dependent (Currently i386 and arm).
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoNo, Chrome is your "OS" in this case. You do have to account for processors though. Right now there is x86-32, x86-64, and ARM. Go to any of the games and after you've started, right click and save-as to get the nmf file. It's a manifest which has separate nexes for each processor (these are just x86-32 and x86-64).