Twitter Stops Users From Playing DOS Games Inside Tweets

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Twitter Stops Users From Playing DOS Games Inside Tweets

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 5, 2015 @07:16AM from the no-fun-allowed dept.

jones_supa writes: Twitter has killed off an interesting trend of playing DOS games in tweets. Last week, users discovered they could use the new "Twitter Cards" embedding feature to bundle full DOS games within tweets. Running DOSBox inside the web browser is possible thanks to an Emscripten port of DOSBox called Em-DOSBox. The games were pulled from Internet Archive's collection of 2,600 classic titles, many of which still lack proper republishing agreements with the copyright holder. So, is embedding games within Twitter Cards, against the social network's terms of service? Either way, Twitter has now blocked such activity, likely after seeing the various news reports and a stream of Street Fighter II, Wolfenstein 3D and Zool cheering up people's timelines.

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The main concern by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:24 · Score: 4, Interesting

The main concern is that enough people rediscover old games, not upholding copyright. Personally, even as a good ranking gamer in contemporary FPSes, I could ditch every game made past 1983 and be very happy with the earlier ones.
1. Re:The main concern by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:29 · Score: 0
  
  So you made 1983 your cutoff so you could play E.T.? You sick freak!
2. Re:The main concern by ganjadude · 2015-05-05 07:48 · Score: 1
  
  id raise the time frame to when nintendo stopped making console cartridges. I still loved my 64 and play it and SNES more than modern systems
  
  --
  have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
3. Re:The main concern by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:48 · Score: 0
  
  Ditto. I don't even play a lot, and now with a PS3, the process is.
  1) dust off console and turn it on.
  2) Discover that whatever game I want to play needs to download 8GB of updates.
  3) Forget it for another week.
  This simply was never a problem before consoles connected to the Internets.
4. Re:The main concern by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 09:16 · Score: 0
  
  Agreed, It's pretty sad to see patches and updates on release day with so many modern games.
5. Re:The main concern by narcc · 2015-05-05 10:19 · Score: 1
  
  It only gets better with time
  
  --
  Required reading for internet skeptics
6. Re:The main concern by damnbunni · 2015-05-05 11:10 · Score: 2
  
  You know, if you unplug the ethernet cable from the PS3, you can just play the game without updating it.
  (Or disable the wifi, I guess. My PS3 is one of the wired-only ones.)
  Granted, that won't work for online play, but people playing online generally don't gripe about needing to download updates.
  The only time I ever put my consoles online is when I want to buy something from one of the download shops.
They want to monetize it by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

Twitter is so desperate to make money, they'll only bring this back if they can somehow profit off of it.
1. Re:They want to monetize it by Runaway1956 · 2015-05-05 07:32 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Yes - and THAT would be a blatant copyright violation.
  Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.
  Casual users playing around with the code is cool, in my opinion. Corporate users making a profit, however indirectly, is not so cool.
  
  --
  "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
2. Re:They want to monetize it by AthanasiusKircher · 2015-05-05 10:02 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.
  Umm, when was that exactly? Wide-scale publication was not possible until the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The first copyright privilege after that was granted in 1486, and others quickly followed in the 1490s and early 1500s. They were almost exclusively granted to PRINTERS, not authors.
  It would take a couple more centuries before authors (not printers) tended to be granted copyright and thus had primary control over profit.
  (I of course take your point that Twitter making money off of this would be copyright infringement in the modern sense. But your idyllic "back in the mists of time" when no one was guaranteed profit and authors got some of it... well, it wasn't quite like that.)
Dosbox in a browser? by Runaway1956 · 2015-05-05 07:30 · Score: 0

Do I REALLY want to run a dosbox in my browser? How long until someone comes up with an exploit? Yeah, maybe I have some advantages over Windows users, and maybe I don't. I certainly lose any advantages I might have, if I carelessly, and pointlessly allow unknown code to run. I already block javascript on all but "trusted" sites. I'm going to allow dos code to run? Nahhhh - I'll pass.
Yeah, I actually do like some of those old dos games. Why don't I just download them myself, and run them in a sandbox, or a VM? No need to get my browser involved, or to mindlessly click through some permissions dialogue.

--
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
1. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:38 · Score: 0
  
  It's compiled into javascript, so it doesn't have any more exploit-ability than javascript itself has. You can run linux in your browser too.
2. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2015-05-05 07:43 · Score: 2
  
  Is there any reason to suspect that the version of dosbox compiled into javascript is more vulnerable to having programs inside punch their way out than the version of dosbox compiled for your platform of choice is?
  
  I doubt that it is god's gift to efficiency; but it isn't obvious why dosbox would be a more permeable VM in-browser than it is on the desktop(how permeable it is, or isn't, I don't know, it probably gets less testing than the more heavily used and often publicly exposed VMs; but it is also emulating something relativley simple compared to those).
3. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:44 · Score: 0, Insightful
  
  Yeah. GP is a fucking moron
4. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Dan+East · 2015-05-05 07:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Do I REALLY want to run a dosbox in my browser?
  How are we supposed to know the answer to that.
  
  How long until someone comes up with an exploit?
  An exploit to what exactly? Are you actually asserting that someone will discover a JavaScript security hole, then instead of simply exploiting it with a standard web page, they would instead construct an ms-dos program designed to run in dos box that exploits some additional security hole in dos box in order to exploit the JavaScript vulnerability? Do you happen to be afraid of your own shadow too?
  
  --
  Better known as 318230.
5. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by db48x · 2015-05-05 07:45 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I'd say it's gotten a bit metaphysical at this point. The browser is is running the Javascript inside of a sandbox. This particular javascript file is a cross-compiled version of Dosbox, plus some API wrappers to make Dosbox think that it's running in Linux with SDL2. Dosbox in turn is emulating the CPU and hardware of a typical 386, as well as providing implementations of various DOS facilities.
  Browser exploits exist (or at any rate have existed in the past, and may exist in the future; a 0-day may or may not exist at any given time), and most of them use Javascript in some way; this much is true. However, why write a DOS program that tricks Dosbox into tricking Emscripten into running that exploit when you could just run the exploit directly? This might be a great way to show off, but wouldn't be very practical.
6. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Intrepid+imaginaut · 2015-05-05 07:53 · Score: 1
  
  Whatever that was meant to do, it isn't doing it.
7. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:54 · Score: 0
  
  Holy shit, he was modded interesting, too.
8. Re: Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 07:59 · Score: 1
  
  Please, don't feed the trolls..
9. Re: Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:15 · Score: 1
  
  Fine, but is it alright if I feed someone who writes an emulator to host an operating system which runs a program that feeds the trolls?
10. Re: Dosbox in a browser? by belthize · 2015-05-05 08:17 · Score: 1
  
  Purina CoderChow(TM) made from 100% all natural compounds and elements.
11. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:19 · Score: 0, Flamebait
  
  Slashdot - where curmudgeons hangout to bitch about what the "kids are doing these days."
  Articles you might also be interested in:
  * Getting those damn kids off your lawn!
  * What you can still do in 32KB of RAM!
  * What's with all the high-speed bandwidth?
  * Finding a floppy drive for your new laptop!
12. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:27 · Score: 0
  
  You mad?
13. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:28 · Score: 0
  
  And where the kids come to bitch about stuff they have no clue about.
14. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by sexconker · 2015-05-05 08:28 · Score: 2
  
  You failed with that last one. We don't use laptops.
15. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:35 · Score: 0
  
  * Getting those damn kids off your lawn!
  Oh look he tripped and now his helicopter parent is mad at me. Oh look I am getting taken into court because they hurt themselves.
  * What you can still do in 32KB of RAM!
  Why yes I am an embedded SoC programmer. Why do you ask?
  * What's with all the high-speed bandwidth?
  There is not enough of it
  * Finding a floppy drive for your new laptop!
  My boss will not give up that 2.5 million dollar piece of hardware they bought in the mid 90s. Why do you ask?
16. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:54 · Score: 0
  
  Just don't run Widnows 95 with the first IE broser in it and you should be fine.
17. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by istartedi · 2015-05-05 09:15 · Score: 1
  
  Do I REALLY want to run a dosbox in my browser?
  Just type WIN at the command prompt and hit enter, LOL.
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
18. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 09:39 · Score: 0
  
  DOS sucked 25 years ago, I didn't want it then and I still don't want it.
  And no, I don't want any of those old DOS games. When I want an ancient games I'll put in Lemmings or something similar.
19. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Bing+Tsher+E · 2015-05-05 09:52 · Score: 1
  
  Are you actually asserting that someone will discover a JavaScript security hole, then instead of simply exploiting it with a standard web page, they would instead construct an ms-dos program designed to run in dos box that exploits some additional security hole in dos box in order to exploit the JavaScript vulnerability?
  That would be a much more interesting hack than the usual exploits. Probably it would be worthy of posting on slashdot.
20. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Falos · 2015-05-05 09:57 · Score: 1
  
  Biters show up to say it's just a javascript sandbox. Counters point out vulnerabilities. Counters are countered. We bitterly bitch, we derail into pepsi vs coke, and someone Godwins.
  
  If I could advocate parent, s/he exhibited instincts we've been trying to teach. Our security guy slapped together a little phising/soc-engineering training video that a few of our departments got added to their training, including IT. I realized you could boil the thing, and all it was really saying is Be Skeptical, over and over.
  
  The other instinct I noticed is the one that wants to downloading something you can control and manipulate, run it on a proper loader. Not saying that one should be universal like the Caution above, just observing it.
21. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Crashmarik · 2015-05-05 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  * What you can still do in 32KB of RAM!
  God damn youngster
  http://www.bricklin.com/histor...
  There's visicalc in 28K
22. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 12:50 · Score: 0
  
  I have both 5.25 and 3.5 floppy in my computer, thank you. Tho my old archived C64 game floppy disks are failing lately.... :(
23. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 17:49 · Score: 0
  
  So it's just a few layers:
  Hardware
  BIOS
  OS
  Browser
  Javascript sandbox
  DOSBox emulation script (emulates DOS, BIOS and CPU)
  Game
  It's not that metaphysical at all. It's just emulation which has been around for ages.
24. Re:Dosbox in a browser? by db48x · 2015-05-05 21:44 · Score: 1
  
  It supports consoles as well, via JSMESS. https://archive.org/details/gg...
playing games inside of tweets? by shadowrat · 2015-05-05 08:27 · Score: 2

were the games in the tweets? i thought the tweets were in a browser running on the user's machine.
1. Re:playing games inside of tweets? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:50 · Score: 0
  
  BWAAAAAAAAAAM
  http://inception.davepedu.com/noflash.php
Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:34 · Score: 0

The games looked awful because of unevenly resized pixels. I'd hate for newcomers to get to know the classics through terrible shit-vision like that.
1. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 08:42 · Score: 0
  
  let's not pretend monitors back in the day would've been any better at matching the advertised aspect ratio; also they weren't even planar.
2. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 09:27 · Score: 0
  
  That's right. They should only get to know the classics in the pure Hercules Monochrome and CGA with PC speaker bleeps and bloops. Then they'll be excited to see Tandy 16 color and Tandy 3-voice FM modulation. Sierra games especially seemed to really take advantage of the EGA/VGA modes. Amiga games were even better than that. Well, if you give them VGA or MCGA graphics, be sure that there's no VSYNC so that they can see the top half of the screen refresh, then the bottom half. Soundblaster emulation is right out, too, unless they can figure out which IRQs a game wants, or which cryptic exe or cfg file edits. None of this Plug-n-Pray nonsense.
  
  Oh, and don't give them a turbo button (or Mo'slo) so their games will run 100x faster than the developers ever envisioned it running it. Original Xcom at least *tried* to deal with this with speed settings in the tactical game menu, but not the geoscape. Mo'slo should've worked fine, but XCOM was a set of several EXEs (mainly 2) that used a primitive API for passing data back and forth between themselves. Problem was, you could moslo xcom.exe, but GEOSCAPE and TACTICAL always ran way faster than they should have. They fixed that in the Win95 version, but then broke the graphics. If the aspect ration was not precisely 4:3, the screeen wrapped and looked terrible. f0dder's still my hero for fixing that with his loader, I believe now fixed by XcomUtil, or better by openXcom. Too bad openXcom doesn't run in DOSBOX?
3. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 23:33 · Score: 0
  
  I'm not talking about screen ratio, I'm talking about the kind of thing you get when you nearest-neighbour resize an image to like 1.5 times its size. All the pixels will become different sizes from each other, and you can barely recognize what some things are supposed to be anymore. A nightmare for any pixel artist. Also text becomes incredibly painful to read, see the dosbox startup at the beginning.
4. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 23:58 · Score: 0
  
  I guess you're right about all that, this is exactly why I've always been a console gamer. Even today I don't quite feel like PC gaming is comfortable in its own environment.
  Still, resizing a game image in such a way that every pixel becomes a different size from the one next to it, is a step above and beyond any of the problems you mentioned. It's every pixel artist's worst nightmare, and frankly it's about as good for representing the original artwork as that Spanish fresco restoration was.
5. Re:Good by guruevi · 2015-05-06 01:30 · Score: 1
  
  Then you probably need a better screen. Back then, the highest resolution was 640x480 and later 1024x768. If your system can't double or quadruple that correctly then you need to get a better display. Or don't resize it at all. Back then we DID play on 12"/14" displays.
  
  --
  Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
6. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-06 02:53 · Score: 0
  
  We're still talking about these small tweet boxes. Most people are just going to play them as-is.
Good by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 09:05 · Score: 0

ARCHiVETeaM is a lamer oldwarez group anyway.
let me get this straight.. by edxwelch · 2015-05-05 09:10 · Score: 1

tweets are still restricted to 140 characters, yet they allow you to embed dos games into the message?
1. Re:let me get this straight.. by Hognoxious · 2015-05-05 09:48 · Score: 1
  
  They probably use cloudpointers to dynamically vault the constraingarden's wall, or something like that.
  
  --
  Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
2. Re:let me get this straight.. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 18:01 · Score: 0
  
  It's only text that is restricted. Pictures, URLS (and so other media) have always been allowed.
  The idea is to get away from having to read large slabs of text that can be offputting to some people.
No fun allowed. by Jack+Zombie · 2015-05-05 09:59 · Score: 1

Why use a megacorp website that hates fun?

--
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Re:fago6krz by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 13:44 · Score: 0

super nes cdrom?
Don't bother. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-05 14:18 · Score: 0

DOSBox is a great product, but I really don't think the browser port does it justice. The actual program (compiled for x86) is capable of performing DRC (dynamic recompilation) on the fly, allowing you to easily meet and exceed the power of any system it can emulate. The browser version has troubles emulating a 386, let alone a 486 or Pentium (586). IMHO; the experience is subpar and nowhere near as smooth and uninterrupted as it should be.
Likewise, if you're trying to play some of the more heavier DOS games out there (Crusader: No Remorse, Crusader: No Regret, Quake, DN3D, Mass Destruction, Wipeout, Descent 2, GTA, Syndicate 2, System Shock, etc) it basically won't work at all, you'll be stuck with an equivalent frame rate of about 2-3 FPS and have a crapton of audio synchronization issues.
Seriously, DOSBox runs *perfectly* under Windows (and Boxer is an amazing port for Mac OS X). Do yourself a favour and respect the old classics and play them properly, because they really don't deserve to be shoved in this horrible browser hack and mistreated that way.
1. Re:Don't bother. by db48x · 2015-05-05 21:43 · Score: 1
  
  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Also, your browser is dynamically recompiling the javascript.
What's more impressive by guruevi · 2015-05-06 01:32 · Score: 1

Is that games from back then can fit in a tweet from nowadays. Imagine that every stupid tweet you have ever sent, seen or received is a full-fledged video game. That's how scarce our storage space was back then (and we liked it).

--
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com