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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.
Naww, I grew tired of Denial of Service attack games.
Table-ized A.I.
For those who have recovered from clicking your link, there's an actual short best-of:
https://archive.org/details/so...
They've got Master of Orion. Ok I'm just going to close up this story, walk away and pretend I didn't see it, before I go looking for Star Control and lose the next 4 months of my life to those games again.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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...
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).
The Internet Archive has a laudable goal, but these days they seem to just be shooting for straight-up piracy, not only hosting copies of games that are still for sale, but making them playable right on their site... I mean, they've got Street Fighter II in their arcade section...
To be honest, I'm shocked nobody has sued them yet. They really don't have any fair use defense.
Nintendo was very popular when I was in grade school (near Washington DC). I can think of only one friend who did not have one (and they had a Sega Genesis). I still have mine, along with a spare I picked up, and 80-90 games for it. These days, I play the Super Nintendo more. I remember the schools having Atari computers, and Apple IIGS computers, but I can't remember any Commodores or Amigas. My dad used MS-DOS at work, so we had a progression of 8086-286-386-Pentium 75 MHz- Pentium II @ 450 MHz at home all running Microsoft OSes. I learned Linux after the Pentium 75 MHz had been demoted to scrap status, so I could play with it however I wanted. I remember running RedHat 5.1 (the old 5.1), and it taking many hours to rebuild the 2.0 kernel.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
The real problem is that when archive.org gets sued into oblivion over this it's going to take the good stuff with the bad.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The Internet Archive has a laudable goal, but these days they seem to just be shooting for straight-up piracy, not only hosting copies of games that are still for sale, but making them playable right on their site... I mean, they've got Street Fighter II in their arcade section...
To be honest, I'm shocked nobody has sued them yet. They really don't have any fair use defense.
See, this is how the Copyright Cartels want you to think. It's not piracy, and it is fair use. If a owner of any of the software has a problem, they can ask for it to be removed.
Be seeing you...
You're going to be absolutely shocked if you ever wander in to your local library!
Required reading for internet skeptics
NES was huge in the USA. Everyone I knew owned a NES which came with mario and duck hunt. Some of the games
I remember were metal gear, double dragon, zelda, ninja turtles, tetris, and mario 1, 2, and 3.
c64 never really caught on with the non-geek crowd where I lived, they went straight from the atari to the NES to the IBM PC.
At home everyone had a NES and all the schools had some variation of the apple II. NES and the super nes remained
popular until ibm overtook the apple II at school which happened about the same time that wolfenstein, doom, and the
internet came out. We started getting ibms and internet connectivity at school in the mid to late 90s.
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.
A pile of just games, really? Not even manuals?
Archive.org seems like the kind of place that should have the resources to scan and host all kinds of serious material. There are many, many, "boring" vintage applications, application manuals, and other computer system manuals, that have not yet been archived.
Give me R:Base 4000, UCSD p-system for IBM PC, the Kaypro 2000 utility disk (with color utility), Digital Research DR Logo for IBM PC, or how how about the impossible to Google for 1980s telecommunications program from Microsoft called "Access". Given time I could list hundreds more that need archiving. And even when some messy partial copy surfaces, many of these are useless without their manuals.
Chances are archive.org are just up for the attention grab, and I do hope that in the long run perhaps it benefits all media that needs archiving.
ZZT?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...
It doesn't matter if it's fair use or not.
It's historical preservation.
"Arguing the law" here is silly. As a crime, NO ONE cares. As a tort, no one seems to be willing to step forward. Until they do, you can't say there are any damages. Even then, what would those damages even be?
There is simply no basis for "pretentious moral outrage".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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).
Fair use is not the only limit on the scope of U.S. copyright. Section 108 describes exceptions for nonprofit libraries to make copies for patrons.
There is simply no basis for "pretentious moral outrage".
Right...
"Arguing the law" here is silly. As a crime, NO ONE cares.
No, it should be the exact opposite. Pretending that the law happens to agree with one's lack of moral concern is not how one should react to this, but isntead realizing how stupid the law is that it still says it is illegal.
Why, are libraries making copies of entire books and giving them away? Last I checked all the books they had were legally purchased with a valid copyright page and could only be lent to one person at a time.
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.
And you're clearly going to be shocked if you ever learn how a library actually works.
Hint: the books (and CDs, and DVDs, and games) on the shelves are legally purchased copies, and are lent to a single patron at a time. They are not printouts of torrented epubs.
I love the Internet Archive but I seriously have no idea what they think they're doing here.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The Nintendo console was very popular in the US, but it is undeniable that the C64 was a hugely successful machine. The C64 also competed more directly with earlier consoles like the Atari 2600, Colecovision, etc. The Atari 2600 was very popular because it was extremely easy to setup, plug it into a TV and that's it.
I also did a lot of Amiga and Atari ST gaming as those are the machines my Dad was into and got. I didn't have a lot of people around me with similar computers to trade games with. I believe both of those machines were much more popular in Europe while the PC compatible clones were starting to take over the US market at the end of the C64's life.
Yes, it might be that the whole "gamers bought C64/Amiga, Atari XL/ST and ZX Spectrum" thing was mainly european. I just looked at the Wikipedia article for the NES, and it says about the sales numbers "Worldwide: 61.91 million, Japan: 19.35 million, Americas: 34.00 million, Other: 8.56 million". So the whole of the world, except Japan and the US, bought only 1/4 of the number of consoles the US bought. Like I said - I do not know anybody among my friends/relatives who bought a Nintendo console. Around here in Germany, the usual transition was C64/... to Amiga/ST/... to PC and back in the 80s/90s, trading disks on the schoolyard was huge.
This is Jason Scott. If you e-mail at at jscott@archive.org, I'll be glad to sort it out.
Dosbox? Heretic! Get that old 386 running again, install Dos 6.2 and tinker with config.sys and autoexec.bat 'til you have enough low ram to run it! That's the only true way to do it!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Heretic? Don't be silly, Heretic requires 486-33, 4 megs RAM, VGA, 10 megs HD space :}. Even crazier though, the shareware download for this game from 1995 is 2.8MB, smaller than a single pic from my smartphone. http://www.doomworld.com/idgam...
How about first checking if you are allowed to publish the game like this before actually doing it?
What makes them different from any other internetuser?
I fairly sure it's their entire library, was getting updates from the Usenet but god was that ever slow going.
MAME_0.149_CHDs_A-B
MAME_0.149_CHDs_C
MAME_0.149_CHDs_D-G
MAME_0.149_CHDs_H-N
MAME_0.149_CHDs_P-S
MAME_0.149_CHDs_U-Z
MAME_0.149_EXTRAs
MAME_0.149_ROMs
These are game disk images http://fileinfo.com/extension/...
I added up the files (torrents) and I've got 308 Gigs worth of games, most of which I'll pry never load let alone play.
If your not aware the program MAME will load the ROMs of the old arcade games, so you can play your old favs. MAME has been ported to most tablets and cell phones, not that they all work that well. "Moon Patrol" is a great cell phone game for me as there are only 4 keys that you use, fairly fun to play and it's great bathroom throne material.
"MAME can currently emulate several thousand different classic arcade video games from the late 1970s through the modern era."
http://mamedev.org/
Kingdom of Kroz? Holy shit, how did that retain space in my brain? This is why I can't have nice things
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They are curating a collection, like a museum does. There are museums dedicated to old computers and old games consoles, which allow visitors to view and even use old software that is still under copyright. They are tolerated and while I don't know the exact legal situation in the US, judging the the policy of Archive.org of not collecting games that are still for sale or where removal has been requested I'd imagine that is representative of it.
As for games that seem current like Street Fighter 2, it's the DOS version specifically which I seem to recall sucked pretty badly. I imagine if it was the arcade ROM then Capcom might care, but no-one will consider this version running in a browser based emulator and played with the keyboard to be a reasonable substitute.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've got a Virtualbox setup with MS DOS and a stack of 2GB virtual drives packed chock full of full version games and apps, I've had to put a clock limiter on it because watching USS Ticonderoga scroll through at $stupid fps makes me dizzy.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I am dreamlayers
I first used this: https://git.cryptopath.org/cer...
Only one important commit is there: https://git.cryptopath.org/cer...
That code compiled but did not work. I made changes and got a DOS program to run. Then I decided to start with a git repository which has all the DOSBox history and re-do things in a cleaner way. These two em-dosbox-0.74 commits on Jan 5, 2014 are based on the cerial/dosbox commit mentioned earlier:
Compile error fixes f6e0953
Disable SDL CD and CD image support on Emscripten. 59e11b1
For example, take a look at how CD function bodies were commented out and replaced with "return false" in the cerial commit. I used a different method, removing most CD functions and using "#ifdef EMSCRIPTEN".
I can safely say I did most of the porting work overall, but Ismail deserves some credit. I am sorry about not saying anything in the commit messages. Don't forget to credit the DOSBox developers. The porting work is tiny compared to the overall effort invested in DOSBox.