Thousands of DOS games have been added to the Internet Archive

[Matrix]

 

 

 

In brief: With 2,500 playable MS-DOS titles added to the Internet Archive, it just got a lot more tempting to take a nostalgic trip back to the '80s and '90s and play your favorite games from the era, conveniently in your browser.

Fans of classic PC games might want to head over to this page and browse the collection of MS-DOS titles recently added to the Internet Archive, making it the biggest update to the digital library since 2015.

Thanks to Project eXoDOS, the cataloging of DOS games has been enabled for "easy playability on modern systems to tracking down and capturing, as best as can be done, the full context of DOS games – from the earliest simple games in the first couple years of the IBM PC to recently created independent productions that still work in the MS-DOS environment," said archivist Jason Scott.

What makes this feat remarkable is how much effort of acquisition and configuration went into preserving programs that ran on very specific setups and making these available for everyone. Jason notes that many of them "were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories."

He further mentions adding a percentage of these games into the Emularity system on the Internet Archive for research, entertainment and quick online access. Given that this work was done by him and didn't involve the eXoDOS project, Jason also gave out his email address to help with any questions or technical concerns that users might have.

Discussing various emulating issues with browsers, he particularly stated the need to load large amounts of data from later games that were based off CD-ROMs. The audio and video enhancements brought to these titles via 700-megabyte CDs would now require a fairly robust network connection to pull their entire content into memory and hold it.

"This is going to be an enormous lean on the vast majority of Internet users out there – downloading multi-hundred-megabyte files into memory and then keeping them there, and then losing it all when the browser window closes. Network speeds will improve over time, but this is probably the biggest show-stopper of them all for many folks," noted Jason.

Among the smaller-sized games, he recommends checking out Microsoft Adventure, Mr. Blobby, Super Munchers: The Challenge Continues, Street Rod, Digger and Floppy Frenzy. That is, if you don't end up playing some of your own favorites first.

 

 VIEW: Original Article.

[HandyPAF]

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The Internet Archive has been updated with more than 2,500 DOS games, marking the most significant addition of games to the archive since 2015.

 

New additions include forgotten classics like Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, Princess Maker 2, and Microsoft Adventure, a rebranding of Colossal Caves Adventure. They also include a whole lot of weird, early experiments and dead ends that should be fascinating to explore for historians, technologists, game designers, and players alike.
 

The blog post announcing the additions includes some disclaimers: not all games will run as speedily as one might like, not all games have manuals available (though some do), and frankly, not all games from these bygone areas are enjoyable by modern standards.

 

But given that many of the games from this era were distributed via floppy disks in plastic bags, preservation seems both an admirable and necessary undertaking. There's as much value in the fact that these games are hosted somewhere safe as there is in the fact that they're playable. As technology marches forward, it's important to remember not to discard the old permanently just because the new is more expedient.
 

Many of these games were added to the Internet Archive as a result of the eXoDOS game preservation and restoration project. Internet Archive curator Jason Scott had this to say about that project:

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What makes the collection more than just a pile of old, now-playable games, is how it has to take head-on the problems of software preservation and history. Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps. DOS has remained consistent in some ways over the last (nearly) 40 years, but a lot has changed under the hood, and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup. They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories.

 

It is all these extra steps, under the hood, of acquisition and configuration, that represents the hardest work by the eXoDOS project, and I recognize that long-time and Herculean effort. As a result, the eXoDOS project has over 7,000 titles they've made work dependably and consistently.

 

 

As game subscription and streaming services take hold, though, it's worth asking how we're going to preserve today's games for future generations.

 

For more information about the project, as well as some insights into the challenges of adapting CD-ROM games for use in a browser, among other things, head to the Internet Archive and read Scott's blog post—then play some long-forgotten games.

 

 

Source: Thousands of DOS games have been added to the Internet Archive by Samuel Axon

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[zanderthunder]

Ah, I miss games from the 90's on my childhood days. Though nowadays I have to run these games under DOSBox emulator since I'm running 64-bit of Windows. Can be played directly without emulator if running 32-bit of Windows (with Win95 compatibility mode activated).