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DOS_deck: Play DOS games in the browser with full controller support
- icemelt8 3y agoI love jazz the jackrabbit, thanks for this. Any way to save the game
- thristian 3y agoThe site says all the games offered are shareware, freeware, demo versions, or "liberated" (i.e. officially released as freeware after they became commercially unviable). Most of the currently listed games are shareware from id Software or Apogee (or both), and I recall hearing about Command & Conquer being released as freeware at one point, but I'm surprised to see Dune II and The Black Cauldron on that list — I feel like I would have heard about Dune II being released, and I can't imagine The Mouse giving up any control over intellectual property, even something as mostly-forgotten as The Black Cauldron.
- speps 3y agoA few of these are still for sale on gog.com and should probably be removed as you say it doesn't seem super legit right now. If I was the author, I'd make it clear it's all demo versions and actually source these versions instead of full games. Shows the proof of concept without entering legal issues.
- TonyTrapp 3y agoThe ones I tried (Jazz Jackrabbit and Epic Megagames) were not full versions. So nothing wrong there.
- prmoustache 3y agoSee also, based on same js-dos code https://dos.zone/ https://dos.zone/ https://js-dos.com/v7/build/docs/ https://js-dos.com/v7/build/docs/
- chem83 3y agoWould love to see more of these websites implement the JS-DOS on-screen keyboards configurations to allow games w/ key shortcuts (like, say, Civilization) to be played on touchscreen devices.
- vanderZwan 3y agoOn my machine both websites seem to run the emulators much choppier in Firefox than in Chrome. Does it use any JS features that Firefox is known to be slow at, or should I suspect a difference in hardware acceleration of rendering the image?
- findthewords 3y agoExtremely responsive interface on Firefox and Chromium. How do you achieve that? Well done.
- wigster 3y agovery slick - i'd forgotten the horrible heretic music
- saturn8601 3y agoIts MIDI though so it depends on the sound card being used. They are using Adlib emulation so its not the best sounding. Using something better like a Roland SoundCanvas it does not sound that bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if6n3QIJqbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if6n3QIJqbs
- bonton89 3y agoReally? I always thought the e1l1 track was banging. Doom has more memorable music overall though.
- teddyh 3y agoThe image is distorted and squashed, because the aspect ratio is wrong. It should be 4:3, but it is closer to 16:10.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoI'm not so sure about it. Yes it's 16:10, but a few games I played, they look fine to me, not squashed. Without a solid reference it's hard to tell, but the cursor in C&C is definitely a perfect circle: https://i.imgur.com/f3SZD3t.png https://i.imgur.com/f3SZD3t.png so it's at least not squashed at canvas/screen level. And stretching any screenshots to 4:3 (I tried a few in Photoshop) definitely is more distorted.
- sgt 3y agoAs far as C&C is concerned, that looks correct.
- teddyh 3y agoI have noticed that a lot of people don’t notice when a video or image is squashed or stretched to the wrong aspect ratio. They simply don’t see it, and aren’t bothered by it even it is pointed out and they agree. So anyone saying that they don’t see anything wrong is, sadly, not an indication of correctness. What is an indication is if there are any people (like me, and commenter glhaynes), who do notice it.
- glhaynes 3y agoLooking at The Black Cauldron, which I'm very familiar with, it's stretched and manually resizing to 4:3 looks right. I think the thing is, the rendered image isn't being stretched, but the problem is that it _should_ be: because the 320×200 resolution that this is emulating has non-square pixels on the 4:3 displays it was displayed on. Essentially everything today uses square ones. It'd need to be 320×240 to have square pixels on a 4:3 display. As to why the cursor in C&C is a perfect circle: I'm guessing it's because the C&C authors didn't adjust for non-square pixels. So it would've looked slightly-taller than a perfect circle on original hardware.
- queuebert 3y agoThis is amazing. I've always wanted to go back to Commander Keen with a gamepad.
- hotnfresh 3y agoThe pogo stick jump in Keens 1-3 took a lot of getting used to and one still tended to fail at it quite a bit, on keyboard. I hadn’t thought about it before, but yeah, I bet it’s much easier on a gamepad.
- vapidness_is 3y agoVery cool! I've built a similar platform for GB, GBA and SNES at https://afterplay.io https://afterplay.io I've thought about adding DOS support in the future. What emulator did you end up using? Very nice implementation :)
- Sarkie 3y agoThere's an About tab. DOSBox allowed these classic games to run, but it required installation on a computer, limiting accessibility. Fortunately, the magic of modern web technology came to the rescue. Some ingenious individuals managed to make DOSBox run within a web browser, giving rise to the marvelous software package known as JS-DOS. DOS_deck is built upon the foundation of JS-DOS, which, in turn, relies on DOSBox. Together, they breathe new life into MS-DOS games by bringing them to your browser. However, there's a twist. Games from that era were designed for keyboard and mouse input, without established standards for interaction or control patterns. Here at DOS_deck, a tremendous effort was put into creating a seamless experience, enabling you to effortlessly navigate and play these games, ideally with the comfort of a controller in hand. Rediscover a golden age of gaming with DOS_deck. It's the bridge between the past and the present, connecting you to a world of digital memories and timeless adventures.
- AntoniusBlock 3y agoYour site is great. I've signed up and I'm using it now to re-play EarthBound. Thanks.
- vapidness_is 3y agoThank you so much. EarthBound is awesome. I played it for the first when I added SNES to Afterplay. Are you playing on desktop or mobile?
- AntoniusBlock 3y agoI'm playing on desktop. I tried to play in Firefox's private mode, but the emulator didn't load. I don't know if this is intended or a bug, but just thought I'd let you know.
- amne 3y agosupaplex is in there. I wanted to write this 2 hours ago. help!
- voxadam 3y agoGreat! It's only been five minutes and I'm addicted to Dune II again. I'll never understand what it was about that game that made me play it for hours on end as a kid. I suppose if I had learned more about, even rudimentary, real-time strategy games I may have ended up more of a gamer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Beijinger 3y agohttps://play-cs.com/ https://play-cs.com/
- eigenvalue 3y agoIt's so weird how much better these games looked in my memory (e.g., Dune 2, C&C). I guess when the graphics were so primitive, your imagination filled in the rest. When I look at them now, I realize that units were just a handful of pixels. Then again, I'm looking at it on a 6k 30" LCD screen, when back then I had an 18" CRT.
- apetresc 3y agoThe CRT effect makes a night-and-day difference. The art was not designed with perfect, crisp square pixels in mind at all. You can reproduce the effect in Dosbox with Auto-CRT; if you're so inclined, eXoDOS just released v6 a few weeks ago which bundles CRT shader configurations for every single game in the collection. Or if you know how to use ReShade. Ironically, you would need something like an 8K display at 144Hz+ to fully reproduce the visual effect of a CRT, which basically doesn't exist yet. But even with just 4K the filters make a huge, huge difference.
- eigenvalue 3y agoCool, I’ll try that out.
- claar 3y agoThis feels like a case where real-time upscaling would make a world of difference.
- knodi123 3y ago"Zoom. Enhance."
- malkia 3y agoThere is a device (for $750) that is probably worth buying - https://twitter.com/8bitesquire/status/1724518121174618281 https://twitter.com/8bitesquire/status/1724518121174618281
- 3y ago
- hospitalJail 3y agoCurious what the future looks like for DOS and old Win95 emulation. I cant seem to run some old games from back then with just dosbox. I don't try hard and there are likely solutions, but given what has happend with AI and how that has transformed other data hording, I'm excited about the future.
- Narishma 3y agoPCem or 86box, though they have much higher system requirements.
- hospitalJail 3y agoI can wait patiently for better hardware. :)
- Narishma 3y agoI mean they work fine, you just have to have a high (single-threaded) performance CPU to emulate something like a Pentium II or III.
- tetrisgm 3y agoLook at eXoDOS.
- thom 3y agoThe name got me excited, but I'm definitely in the market for a smoother platform for DOSBox on my SteamDeck. The machine is genuinely excellent for retro gaming because it's so easy to map the mouse and various keyboard shortcuts to its many buttons, and that's increasingly become how I use it instead of more modern games out of Steam. Only issue is there is some faff involved at the moment (but faff that I'm delighted is even possible, it being a full Linux machine and all).
- xjlin0 3y agoI wonder how can I disable the command key on my mac....
- swozey 3y agoPossibly karbiner but I've never looked into doing specifically that, so I may be wrong https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ I use it to map a ton of stuff on my Moonlander layers and my razer tartarus.
- umtksa 3y agocant play heretic on desktop :/ because on mac when you shoot and press left or right mac os bring all windows front of you like you press F3
- Dwedit 3y agoNow the question is how do you do effective profiling for this kind of project? The performance is a little iffy.
- ok123456 3y agoRelated: https://dos.lol https://dos.lol
- malkia 3y agoLots of games can be played on archive.org too https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games like https://archive.org/details/Keen4e-sw https://archive.org/details/Keen4e-sw