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Archive.org Adds Close To 2,400 DOS Games
New submitter Bugamn writes Archive.org has added a new library of DOS games. The games are playable on the browser through EM-DOSBOX, a port of the DOS emulator. The games are provided without instructions, so some experimentation (or search for old manuals) might be necessary. The library does not mention any copyright concerns, although some of the games can be found for sale on sites such as Steam and GoG.
Is goatse link.
For those who have recovered from clicking your link, there's an actual short best-of:
https://archive.org/details/so...
And not a single line in the crefits, source, github-page - nowhere. :/
I even have mails from "dreamlayers" from 2014-01-03, when he discovered my port, and three days later his commits in his repo start...
Would have been nice to be credited correctly...
I will just leave this here then...
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
Yep, sounds about right for the best of games of the DOS era. There's a reason consoles absolutely dominated gaming through the 80s and 90s.
Did they? At least around here in Germany, everybody in the 80s had a C64/Amiga (or maybe Atari ST) for gaming (because you could trade disks at school). Anybody with a console would have been pitied as the poor kid who cannot play the latest games. And from '93 onwards (when Doom arrived and LAN parties started) gaming changed forever, anyway. Maybe it was different in the US, don't know, Nintento consoles apparently were more popular there (I actually cannot remember any of my friends EVER owning a Nintendo console).
Just a note that many games on archive.org cannot be downloaded. They can be played online only, through the uncredited javascript dosbox implementation. Not sure how that affects the legal status of these games.
You jest, but the differences in paradigm between the two platforms merit a quick refresher.
MS-DOS is an operating system for IBM-compatible personal computers that was popular before Windows 95. In gaming terms, it really didn't provide any services beyond a file system (hence the name Disk Operating System), and games for it were coded to access the VGA (graphics), Sound Blaster, keyboard, and joystick hardware directly, bypassing DOS and even BIOS. Various versions of MS-DOS were popular from 1982 through 1995, after which games started to be published for Windows. (Windows 95, 98, and Me used parts of MS-DOS as an underlying layer, but games for that were coded to the Windows 95 DirectX API.) The free software community has developed functional clone of MS-DOS called FreeDOS, much as GNU/Linux is a clone of the UNIX system. It has also developed a partial PC emulator called DOSBox that contains a stripped down clone of MS-DOS. The emulator is not quite cycle-accurate, but because of variance among manufacturers' PCs, PC games tended not to demand cycle accuracy.
Because of fundamental differences in input and graphics capabilities between MS-DOS PCs and the Super NES, games for the two tended to be in different genres. MS-DOS games drew their graphics in software to the VGA's frame buffer, while Super NES games were more likely to rely on the S-PPU's built-in scrollable tile planes and sprite capability. (About a dozen Super NES games contained a faster CPU called Super FX that made software-rendered 3D halfway practical.) With the vast difference in paradigms you can't usefully say one is "before" the other in the sense that the Super NES is "after" the NES and "before" the Nintendo 64.
MS-DOS also had something called "shareware", an early version of what people now call "IAPs". Individuals or small teams would create a game or other application and distribute a feature-limited free version through bulletin board systems and user group-hotsed copy parties. People who wanted the whole thing could mail-order a set of floppies with the complete version. This was impractical on the Super NES, with its more expensive cartridge media and Checking Integrated Circuit (CIC).
Status as "abandonware" actually is based purely on whether the product can currently be bought new. However, "abandonware" is not a legal status and does not give anyone rights to copy the work.
This isn't even a gray area in the law, the law is very clear that it's illegal to copy a copyrighted work unless you are given permission by the copyright holder.
There is a gray area in the *enforcement* of copyright, though, where it's understood that both the original authors and the copyright holders don't really care whether you are distributing these games or not, without really giving anyone license to do so legally. This is only legal in the sense of "it's not illegal if you don't get caught".
They have a DMCA exception for this which they asked the Librarian of Congress for.
This is Jason Scott. If you e-mail at at jscott@archive.org, I'll be glad to sort it out.
I have mixed feelings about this. I have a former shareware game that I've made freeware years ago and occasionally update. It's available from our web site for download.
I would have preferred if Jason had asked me first before uploading it to archive.org. As it stands, while I like the idea, I really don't like someone assuming that I'm okay with it and imposing "Opt-Out" on me if I'm not.
I'm going to mull it over. If I decide to have it remove it, I may offer my own web player (I toyed a while back with JPC.