modeless 14 hours ago

I wish there was an instant play button for some of the multiplayer games, the server browser interface is kind of obtuse. I did the Quake 3 port that they used as the base for their Q3A, and I have my own site that lets you instantly drop into a demo match vs. bots: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/. It's not just the original running in an emulator either, I made it a real web port with features you'd expect in a modern web game that the original didn't have. Things like mobile touchscreen and gamepad controls, ultrawide monitor support, and peer-to-peer internet multiplayer over WebRTC.

I also have an instant-run port of Cave Story: https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/. For that one I added cloud save game sync too. Porting classic games to the web is a fun hobby!

Coming up with touchscreen control schemes for these old games is probably the most interesting part. I really like the controls I came up with for both games. For Quake I determined that you really need automatic shooting for touch controls to feel good, but a naive implementation of an automatic trigger makes the railgun into a win button, so I did something a little more complex that I think is fun to use and not unfair. Cave Story was also challenging; at first I wasn't sure I could make a touch control scheme that would be good enough to beat the game, but with the final scheme I was able to play all the way through (at least to the first ending) purely on touch controls. And you can use the cloud save sync to transfer your save game to a PC for the hard parts if you need to.

  • ecliptik 13 hours ago

    Semi-related, since SDL added support for DOS a few weeks ago I've worked with Claude to port Cave Story to DOS [1].

    On a Pentium 75 it can get 30fps and with decoupling the frame timer it plays at the same speed as the original. The port offloads the Organya synth soundtrack to MIDI to improve performance, and also sounds amazing.

    Still working on a few bug fixes, performance tweaks, and Waveblaster support, but it's playable.

    1. https://codeberg.org/ecliptik/doskutsu

    • po1nt 12 hours ago

      I admire your work, but at the same time I have to ask: Why?

xerox13ster 19 hours ago

First thing I did was pull up Sim City 3000 (I have so many hours of play time on this that never got recorded anywhere) to see if the simulation speed goes nutso like I remember on my old Windows ME MS-DOS Compaq back in the day. Every time I played the game on any XP or newer PC I get speed limited in Cheetah mode and it feels like it takes _forever_ for my city to develop. Not even installing WindowsME on an emulator would fix it because it was some scheduler fix at the NT kernel level or something, idr.

One thing I will say is that this so far has NAILED the experience I remember of loading the game. Thinking the PC had frozen, only to finally be greeted with that gorgeous Maxis loading screen and opening animation.

I have not yet determined if the sim speed goes nutso on Cheetah like I remember, but I will edit this when I do.

Coming back to edit and say that this is absolutely unusable, either due to demand or underspecced VMs. I cannot get through laying infrastructure without the entire emulation freezing hard and forcing me to reload the page.

Coming back again to report that I have been trying for an hour and a half to just get past the city creation stage of the game. I can only get to the point of laying infrastructure in 1/10 attempts and I lose all progress every time because I can't save before it crashes. This is woefully underpowered for a simple simulation game, I c a n n o t i m a g i n e h o w s l o w i t i s f o r a n y f p s o r r a c i n g g a m e.

  • rglover 18 hours ago

    Found this looking for a Sim City 2000 port :)

  • sailfast 15 hours ago

    Need For Speed worked just fine for me, FWIW. Macbook Pro, a couple years old using Firefox.

  • iberator 9 hours ago

    by our age an. experience we finally know how to edit binaries or inject code to cheat in any way possible heheh

  • stavros 9 hours ago

    Doesn't this just run in the browser?

kimixa 14 hours ago

Publishing things that are still available for purchase from storefronts (like steam and gog) seems to be stretching the definition of "abandonware".

While many people would likely justify their piracy with the idea that "The people who made it don't receive that money" - that isn't always true, and even then they did get the cash from selling the rights.

It's not as it playing that one specific game is a human right, after all.

  • bobim 13 hours ago

    True, but in defense of the author site and from a personal perspective, the copyright laws are very skewed and allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once. Even heirs benefit from it for life. Isn't that wildly unfair for all the other jobs where you are paid for your work once for all? And irrespectively from the fact that what you designed has been produced by the million and still running...

    • alberto-m 11 hours ago

      > allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once

      It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them, seeing people that are wishing to spend hours on a game, but not to pay the rightholders the equivalent of 5-10 minutes of average SWE salary.

      • bobim 10 hours ago

        My opinion is that work should be compensated fairly, that's all. I was just highlighting that copyright is a strange exception, the patent system is more fair even if not perfect. 25 years to make money on an idea seems good enough to me.

      • realusername 8 hours ago

        Let's not pretend any of the original developers from the early 2000s or even worse, from the 90s get any money from these old games you buy.

        • alberto-m 8 hours ago

          The site pirates games that are still being sold by their original devs, like “Ports of Call”. Even for some games published by bigger companies, some of the original developers get a small cut on lifetime sales. So I don't need to “pretend” anything.

          • realusername 8 hours ago

            That can happen yes but it's rare, usually they just got their salary and the rights were sold/re-sold/sold again to larger media conglomerates merge after merge.

      • armchairhacker 8 hours ago

        IMO the employees should somehow be paid for making the game based on how well they did so, during development and on release, but not paid later except for updates.

        Because it costs $0 to copy the game, all the resource cost is in production; and popularity is an OK motivation for good games but not the best, as evidenced by the prevalence and revenue dominance of microtransaction slop.

      • Timwi 8 hours ago

        > Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person?

        No, I think people should just be paid a livable UBI and not have to worry about proving their worth to you to be allowed to live.

      • endemic 4 hours ago

        That $7 isn't going to the developers.

  • ktallett 12 hours ago

    Gog and Steam often release versions years later, sometimes items are well abandoned for a decade plus with no interest in release and people fairly download to play. If you then decide to monetize that, I don't think morally you can really blame those who downloaded it and shared it when it was abandoned.

    The whole copyright system needs a huge overhaul as it is taking away the ability to share what is the art and creation forms of today.

  • turpentine 10 hours ago

    It's a Russian warez website, fishing for donations in crypto to bypass sanctions because of their invasion? Pass.

    • tokai 5 hours ago

      Not worse than using Kagi.

      • elevation 4 hours ago

        > Not worse than using Kagi.

        Kagi was founded by Vladimir Prelovac. But it is incorporated in Delaware, and subject to any sanctions the US imposes. It is not a sanctions bypass.

        • tokai 4 hours ago

          They are buying Yandex data for 2% of their revenue. Money that goes directly into the Russian economy.

HeavyStorm 19 hours ago

What the...? Those aren't DOS games, there are plenty Windows DirectX-based games in this site.

  • hungryhobbit 19 hours ago

    Fun fact: earlier Windows OSes ran on top of DOS.

    • toast0 19 hours ago

      Well, DirectX was win95 and later right? Windows Enhanced mode and future is kind of both on top of and underneath dos. There's a kind of wild layering that happens.

      • CodeWriter23 18 hours ago

        Fun fact, Win 95, 98 and ME booted DOS and autoexec'd win for you.

        • masfuerte 18 hours ago

          Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI.

          DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader.

          I do feel that Wikipedia understates the importance of Windows for Workgroups. Internally, it wasn't just Windows 3.1 with networking. It was a trial run for the fundamentals of the Windows 95 architecture.

          • userbinator 18 hours ago

            In other words, they were bare-metal hypervisors which passed through the majority of the hardware, doing a minimum of virtualisation to allow sharing it between VMs. This is easy to see by comparing the responsiveness of a DOS box running something like EDIT in Win9x vs. NT/2K/XP's NTVDM; the latter is a full emulator of basically all the hardware except the CPU.

            • cyberax 17 hours ago

              The unresponsive NTDVM was mainly due to its piss-poor text mode emulation. Win9x still virtualized the graphics card (so you couldn't use SVGA games in Win9x) but its emulation was implemented better.

              • ForOldHack 14 hours ago

                See? Pepperage Farm and cyberax remembers! Exactly.

              • anthk 8 hours ago

                You can use Reactos' NTDVM in Windows XP just fine.

          • ForOldHack 14 hours ago

            This is exactly why I come to HN, vs Wikishemedia... People here WERE THERE!

            When I worked at C_ we used to load Some solitaire game (Freecell) to verify that Windows98SE was in 32-bit mode before installing the network stack, and Chief Legal Officer, and from what I understand CLO was $4,000 a seat.

            Load Driver, Reboot, Solitare, CLO. and then onward to disk optimizing, and then virus scanning... Two people did 89 machines, in 4 days. an entire floor... Food was delivered, and we slept for 4 hours, in the floor below, and on Friday, The head of Legal called us into his office... we showed him the checklist, as complete, and He laughed... the whole department was both amazed and happy.

            He really called us to change his desktop into a scene from JAWS.

            It was Windows 98SE that got a 32-bit disk driver upgrade, and FreeCell verified that it was installed.

            • TazeTSchnitzel 7 hours ago

              Bizarre conflation between 3.x and 9x here.

      • cyberax 17 hours ago

        There was WinG (aka DirectX 1) that worked in Win 3.11 with Win32s.

    • selcuka 15 hours ago

      It's still not correct to call them DOS games as you can't run them on DOS.

      • yjftsjthsd-h 11 hours ago

        That is an interesting semantic question, though - I would say something that needs an extender still counts as a "DOS" program, and I can't quite see the line between that and early Windows. I believe the line exists, mind, but I can't figure out how to define it.

        • alberto-m 10 hours ago

          What about: if the extender is provided with the game (like DOS/4GW) then it's a DOS game; if it needs to be provided by the user (like Win 3.11) it's not.

        • bananaboy 9 hours ago

          Some of these games are absolutely not DOS games though and no amount of semantics can change that. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City requires Windows 98 and DX9 or newer, for example, and it is available here.

          edit: I see Vice City has been removed following a DMCA request!

        • kimixa 9 hours ago

          Yeah, many of the things we consider part of what an "Operating System" provides to programs today were provided by DOS Extenders (or forwarded to something like windows if running under that).

          DPMI was pretty much an "Operating System API/ABI".

    • philipstorry 9 hours ago

      Windows 1-3 ran on top of DOS, with a small caveat for Windows 3.x

      Windows 3.x running in 386 Enhanced Mode had a very small multi-threaded preemptive kernel, which it used to handle its MS-DOS windows. So whilst each Windows program ran cooperatively within Windows and had no memory protection, Windows itself and each DOS window it opened were pre-emptively multitasked and had better memory protection. This wasn't very well documented, but it's the beginnings of Windows no longer running on top of DOS and instead taking over control of the machine.

      Windows 3.1 also introduced "32 Bit Disk Access" which used a custom disk driver to bypass DOS and the BIOS and speed things up. Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) extended that to "32 Bit File Access", which bypassed DOS for file operations.

      Windows 95 only used DOS as a bootstrapper. It would be completely incorrect to say that Windows 95 "ran on top of DOS", as once Windows 95 finished booting it had effectively pulled the rug out from DOS and was handling all I/O, memory operations, and so forth. It would be like saying that Linux runs on top of GRUB - GRUB is no longer in control of the machine, so it's just not true.

      Not that I'm saying you were stating Windows 95 ran on top of DOS, you understand! I'm just putting this information here for educational reasons and expanding on your comment. ;-)

  • antisol 12 hours ago

    Yeah, when I first opened the page, there were 0 DOS games visible.

  • stuaxo 11 hours ago

    Ah. I was hoping some of these were ports, that's a shame.

    Some windows games will run under the hx extender.

vunderba 18 hours ago

Apparently this site is by the same person who created js-dos [1], which is an absolutely fantastic emulator for running and hosting DOS games in the browser.

I used it quite successfully for an official sequel to an old DOS game a few weeks ago, and it even got to the point where it was pretty trivial to patch the js-dos ZIP bundle on the fly to modify how the original DOS game worked.

[1] - https://github.com/caiiiycuk/js-dos

pauldjohns 15 hours ago

What happened? Where did the day go? I guess the good news is the world has fewer demons and Raiden is no longer a threat.

pablonhess 18 hours ago

Oh dang, goodbye productivity for the next decade.

butz 3 hours ago

Oh yes, Quake 3 Arena, classic DOS game.

moniosi 7 hours ago

i love russians' nonchalance for anything regarding copyright

  • otabdeveloper4 6 hours ago

    You can't really sanction a country and cut it off from the global financial markets and then turn around and expect them to respect the conventions of global intellectual property markets.

    • tokai 5 hours ago

      Russia's lack of policing copy right began much much much earlier than the Ukraine war sanctions. I can't understand why you would claim that to be the cause.

lorecore 19 hours ago

For those unfamiliar with it, I highly recommend eXoDOS, it's literally every DOS game ever: https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html

You can even get an extremely cool boxed version: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RetroeXo

  • AnotherGoodName 18 hours ago

    I’ll give a different opinion that it’s really heavyweight to install exodos locally just to get a nostalgia hit when there’s plenty of sites like the above where it’s one click to run an old game fullscreen in a browser window.

    • mrandish 17 hours ago

      True, but when I installed ExoDOS I choose the option where it just downloads the descriptions, tagged metadata and a few screenshots per game with a searchable menu system. You can browse by name, genre, publisher, resolution etc, pick the game you want and it gets only the necessary files from the torrent (which, given the era, are very small). It's quick and seamless.

      I keep minimal ExoDOS, MAME and RetroArch installs on my laptop so when I'm reading a retro article about some cool game I've never heard of (or only vaguely remember) it's easy to download the game files and give it a go. Frankly, retro emulation has gotten so incredible lately with upscaling, 4K texture packs, mods, decomps/recomps and fan translations of Japan-only titles - it's been 18 months since I played a game released in the last decade. Currently, I'm halfway through the best late-90s Japanese shmups. Next up I have 126 PS3/X360 titles curated from top ten lists on my backlog.

    • thom 7 hours ago

      You don’t necessarily know when someone will decide to do a commercial release of an old game, causing it to disappear from various abandonware sites. Much simpler to grab eXoDOS once and use it for life.

  • snvzz 10 hours ago

    >it's literally every DOS game ever

    It is large, but seriously? I do not think it is complete, far from.

the__alchemist 16 hours ago

Hell yea! My mom wouldn't me play the Duke Nukem 3D game CD that game with my joystick because it was too violent and otherwise objectionable. I can finally see what it's about!

Also, it is a riot seeing AoE2 on there; I just finished getting my ass kicked in a 3v3. Got tower dropped and never recovered while my teammates tried to carry.

  • tjpnz 13 hours ago

    I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all outta gum.

    • ForOldHack 11 hours ago

      You're gonna die for that.

lapinovski 6 hours ago

this website been around for a really long time though.

klipklop 17 hours ago

I wish iPadOS properly handled full screen and keyboard input. It runs rather well on my M4 iPad Pro but the lack of proper full screen support in the browser with mouse capture ruins it. Awesome emulator though!

  • thom 7 hours ago

    iDOS 3 works perfectly on my iPad Pro for both DOS games and Win 3.11.

andrew_kwak 13 hours ago

Tried it out for a bit. Brings back memories of playing those classic games on old computers. Does it support multiplayer for any of the titl

keyle 10 hours ago

Wow there goes 45' replaying Dune 2! Thanks.

tmilard 9 hours ago

My games! My youth. Most of them are here. Feels good .

SpaceNoodled 17 hours ago

What's with the slop cover art for Doom?

  • recursive 2 hours ago

    BabyType too, and others.

eapriv 14 hours ago

Looks like AI slop in (some of) the thumbnail images. Why would anyone do that?