Over Two Thousand DOS Games Playable in Your Browser
It is not every day that over two thousand games are made available for gamers. While this is not entirely “legal” that is exactly what happened recently with the Internet Archive. They added 2,500 MS-DOS games to their site. These games are playable in your browser as well, so they are technically is platform independent.
How the magic happens
The Internet Archive achieve this magic through emulators that run in your browser. Everything is done in your browser. I tried out Wizardry VII Crusaders of the Dark Savant but without a keyboard available, I could not get past the start screen. Other than that, the game ran fine on a Samsung Galaxy S7. Same thing for Wolfsbane, another title in the recent update.
Had I used a Bluetooth keyboard I could probably play the game just fine, though I would not want to on such a small screen.
Your mileage will vary greatly
As reported by DSOGaming, the quality of emulation here is hit or miss. Some games run fine while others will not even start. I hope this is just a case of whomever uploaded these not having optimized the emulator and will be corrected soon. I doubt it though as this is a lot of games to adjust the emulator for.
That is true with any general settings with an emulator. That is what I figure happened here. They found a setup online or something that would work for most of the games and used it as default.
I have not messed with this option very much, there may be a way to tweak DOSBox per game after loading it. This might allow for better performance with some games.
What classic DOS game are you most excited to see if it is included in this latest update? I am partial to the Role-Playing Games from the 80’s and 90’s that never made it to consoles myself.
Source: Internet Archive.
This article was originally published on Retro Gaming Magazine, a gaming website I own.
There aren't many DOS classics I'm interested in, but the magic of having all these games playable on browser itself is amazing!
I know of a lot of DOS games but am in a similar boat as you. Just not a lot jump at me now that i look back on them.
This looks like a lot of fun. I'd be curious to try the old Ultima games that I could barely play on my poor-man's hand-me-down IBM compatible (monochrome CGA) in the late 80s because it had no hard drive and I had to switch 5 1/2" floppies so often they wore out.
This is a great option for you then. My only experience with Ultima games was the two that Ultra ported to the NES back in the day.
I was more of a single character 3D dungeon ceawler myself. Stuff like Alternate Reality.
I'll have to check out Alternate Reality. Anything 3D was beyond the capacity of my PC in those days. It seems like I've always been running 10 year old hardware.
I know that feeling. Everyone was running IBM 386's and I was still rocking a Color Computer II with a dot matrix printer and tape recorder for saving. I was a writer early on - self published short stories and poetry "books" I sold at local gas stations for a buck or two (lots of money in the mid to late 80s).
I mostly played games on my brothers Commodore 64 which is where I played Alternate Reality the Dungeon. I still have my character disk - paid a guy $5 to copy it over to a file I can use for emulators so effectively I have been playing the same character for 30 years or so.
When you die and revive from your character disk the game would punish you by randomly lowering one stat by a random amount. By now my character is probably a dunce walking around on one leg blind and mute. Lol.
This was pseudo 3D, it was not "real" so the computer was not being pushed at all, other than the 30+ stats (you can only physically see 5 to 7 represented by numbers on the screen). Rather deep game for the time. If you were mean to a pauper for instance, he would remember and it effected your Good/Evil rating (long before Knights of the Old Republic came along).
It was released on many platforms including the Atari 8-Bit computers, C64, IBM, Apple II, etc. There are fans working on remakes of it but there is so much behind the scenes we have to guess at that it may never happen.
There were seven scenarios planned. #1 was The City and #2 was The Dungeon. They were all going to be interlocking and connected as well (there are large swaths in the first floor of the dungeon that you cannot access because they were to be part of a future expansion.
Some have claim that story behind Alternate Reality was stolen to become The Matrix movies. I cannot say much more without ruining the game though. It is interesting.
That looks really fun, actually.
Those early games left so much to the imagination; I think that's why we have such fond memories of them. It was like they were more of a collaboration between the game and the player.