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Internet Archive Posted 10,000 Browser-Playable Amiga Titles (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the fun-games dept.

The folks behind the Internet Archive have added a huge trove of Amiga games and programs to the site, bringing the total to more than 10,000. All these games can be played on your web browser. The non-profit library first began adding Amiga software to its catalog in 2013. TechCrunch adds: We can't vouch for the quality of all of the Amiga titles that were recently posted up on Archive.org, but there sure as heck are a lot of them -- 10,000+, by the site's count, including favorites as Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, King's Quest and Double Dragon, along with what looks to be a fair amount of redundancy. I'm not really sure what the difference is between Deluxe Pac Man v1.1 and Deluxe Pac Man v1.7a, but I suspect it's fairly minor, even for completists.

42 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. can somebody explain by s122604 · · Score: 2

    How playing these games in browsers work:

    Level set: I work as a developer, mostly on the backend with Java and Java-like languages (groovy, scala, etc..), occasionally .NET, but I actually do some front end work using Angular and EXT-JS... so I'm not a complete buffoon went it comes to front end development..

    Still I wouldn't even know how to start emulating games in the browser.

    1. Re:can somebody explain by red_dragon · · Score: 3, Informative

      It can't be that much different from emulating the games in some other language or platform. You'd have to emulate the CPU and chipset, collect input from the user (keyboard and mouse at least, and holy shit joysticks too!), and output the graphics (HTML5 Canvas) and sound (HTML5 audio) to the browser. Given that the MC68000 family of processors and the Amiga chipset have been emulated many times before already, plenty of inspiration exists to get you started.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
    2. Re:can somebody explain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      In fact this is the very emulator they are using.

      SAE (possibly based off of UAE?)

    3. Re:can somebody explain by DrXym · · Score: 3, Informative
      It appears to use an emulator called SAE which is an Amiga emulator implemented in Javascript against the canvas API. Another way of doing the same would be to take an existing C/C++ emulator and run it through Emscripten compiler to produce asm.js (a subset of JS).

      But web browsers desperately need a better way to run code than turning it into JS - something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS. Chrome did something called PNaCl along those lines but it would have to be adopted across all browsers.

    4. Re:can somebody explain by red_dragon · · Score: 2

      Thanks! Very cool. It does say "heavily based on WinUAE" right there on the front page.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
    5. Re:can somebody explain by Kiwikwi · · Score: 2

      Without knowing anything about the particulars of this solution, a likely approach nowadays would be to take an existing emulator writen in C/C++ and compile it to JavaScript using Emscripten.

      Emscripten produces JavaScript compliant with the asm.js profile, which is a subet of JavaScript that is easily optimized by the browser JS engine, allowing in-browser performance on the order of half of native speed. Given the age of the emulated hardware, this slowdown is not a problem.

      You still have to emulate actual I/O devices in plain HTML+JavaScript, which for these presumably amounts to mapping JavaScript input events to a virtual keyboard, and using a HTML Canvas element to emulate the display. Even joysticks and gamepads can be supported in bleeding edge browsers.

      TL;DR: By standing on the shoulders of giants, and adding a bunch of glue code. :-)

    6. Re:can somebody explain by NotInHere · · Score: 3, Informative

      something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS

      First, there is asm.js, which is a subset of js that runs in almost every browser, which can be easily compiled into assembly. It has been the alternate proposal to PNaCl by mozilla, and has won against the google idea. Its basically the same as PNaCl performance wise, the sole difference is that PNaCl is bytecode while asm.js is in textual representation (and a valid subset of js, so it works even in browsers without direct support for asm.js).

      Of course, the textual representation takes up more space than the bytecode, and even though gzip transport compression (which is usually deployed for http connections) gives a similar end product as pnacl, it takes a little overhead computation wise to decompress and in the end its a redundant step. Therefore, the browser vendors (including microsoft, which in fact really liked asm.js, it used it in its office 356 products) are now working on a native binary successor to PNaCl and asm.js which will get a proper standard. Its called web assembly.

    7. Re:can somebody explain by freeze128 · · Score: 2

      A noble spirit emscriptens the smallest man.

    8. Re:can somebody explain by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

      I'd worry more about how to save games between sessions. How can they do that? Without leaving a browser window open forever? These Amiga games...there are a few shoot-em-up arcade style games, but most of them are in-depth experiences that take weeks or months to finish. You need to save your game and come back later.

      I think they don't/won't/can't implement this functionality and thus this playable Amiga archive is worthless. BUT someone got to spend months accomplishing something with all the grant money they got, which is the real reason IMO.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    9. Re:can somebody explain by tbuskey · · Score: 1

      I'd worry more about how to save games between sessions. How can they do that? Without leaving a browser window open forever? These Amiga games...there are a few shoot-em-up arcade style games, but most of them are in-depth experiences that take weeks or months to finish. You need to save your game and come back later.

      I think they don't/won't/can't implement this functionality and thus this playable Amiga archive is worthless.

      The dosbox emulator they use does save games. http://ascii.textfiles.com/arc.... It might be possible (or is already done!) for SAE

    10. Re:can somebody explain by Unordained · · Score: 1

      The javascript emulator would have access to https://www.w3.org/TR/webstora...

    11. Re:can somebody explain by DrXym · · Score: 1
      I said asm.js in the line before. I'm aware what it is, and no it doesn't even approach near-native speeds. If you are in doubt over this I suggest you load up some of the QT demos or CPython in a browser and run a few benchmarks. Performance is appalling and the reason for that is self-evident - Javascript is not designed to model a processor architecture and things like canvas interaction and the browser's event loop have hamstrung performance. Even along optimized paths with specilized objects that mimic memory buffers it is still appalling. And that's even before considering subjects like multi-threading and so on.

      And no, PNaCl is not bytecode in some JVM sense. It uses LLVM bitcode which means it can be translated into native instructions and cached. PNaCl's performance is ~30% more than native but that's primarily due to software fault isolation instrumentation and other sandboxing mechanisms. It's still vastly better than asm.js.

    12. Re:can somebody explain by Schnapple · · Score: 1

      (including microsoft, which in fact really liked asm.js, it used it in its office 356 products)

      Slight point of clarification, the product Microsoft used it in is Office Online (formerly Office Web Apps), which is their web-based implementation of Office products. They're not as full featured or as supported as their desktop counterparts but they are free.

      What they are not, however, is part of Office 365 (or at least not the versions available to the public). Office 365 is Microsoft's term for their subscription-based Office suite. When you're an Office 365 subscriber you have access to the latest desktop versions of Office and you get all the features in the mobile app versions as well.

      This confuses people all the time since people think that Office 365 is Office Online but that's not the case.

      --

      Schnapple

    13. Re:can somebody explain by myrdos2 · · Score: 1

      But web browsers desperately need a better way to run code than turning it into JS - something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS.

      All I know is my cutting edge desktop doesn't have the horsepower to run their Kings Quest II. Judging by the roughly 1 frame per 5 seconds, I'd say my machine needs to be about 150 times faster. Maybe I'll try again in 20 years or so?

    14. Re:can somebody explain by DrXym · · Score: 1

      Try UAE - it's a native Amiga emulator that should have no trouble emulating any Amiga at the correct clock from A1000 all the way to A4000. Perhaps this Amiga emulator isn't as optimal / mature but running over an event driven browser in JS certainly doesn't help. One neat thing about the browser version is how they're using AROS to replace the standard Kickstart / Workbench.

    15. Re:can somebody explain by NotInHere · · Score: 1

      Ah sorry, thanks for the clarification.

    16. Re:can somebody explain by NotInHere · · Score: 1

      Well asm.js is about 50% more than native [1], maybe slower on browsers that don't have asm.js optimisations (the analogon for PNaCl would result in it not working at all). So yes, its 20% difference, but its not considerably far away, unless you say that PNaCl is far away from native speeds.

      Javascript is not designed to model a processor architecture

      No it isn't. But asm.js is. The only thing it doesn't have that "normal" assembly has is gotos, its done via manual loops instead.

      It uses LLVM bitcode which means it can be translated into native instructions and cached.

      Its the same for asm.js, it gets translated into native instructions as well. At least on browsers that care about asm.js.

      [1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013...

  2. How do they do it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Internet Archive has a ton of copyrighted material available. How do they get away with piracy while IP holders go apeshit over "abandonware" and torrent sites?

    1. Re:How do they do it? by silentcoder · · Score: 1

      >If you look at previous cases against copyright infringement the proof has pretty much been "because we say so" and it goes through because the courts doesn't know jack shit and the company representative is dressed in a suit and the "copyright infringer" have slacks and an attitude.

      That pattern seems to be changing though - the recent happy birthday case saw the copyright revoked because WB couldn't prove they ever actually owned it.

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  3. Re:Link to best of list by Layzej · · Score: 1, Troll

    I recently downloaded the WinUAE emulator to play Super Frog, Worms, Lemmings, Gauntlet, Silkworm, Battle Squadron, and Populous with my kids. Good fun!

  4. Cue lawyers in five... four... by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 2

    Some of the publishers are still in business, or the holding company of those that were acquired are still in business.
    I think we can expect their staff bottom feeders to start making threats pretty soon.

    --
    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
    1. Re:Cue lawyers in five... four... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      For a few weeks after Archive.org put up their emulations for coin-op arcade ROMs, you could find the whole Donkey Kong series, the Pac-Man series, Defender/Stargate, Pole Position, and a bunch of other top-tier arcade games in there. Shortly thereafter, the lawyers found out about it and cleared out nearly all of the top-tier games and a good swath of the second-tier ones as well. There are still a few gems that survived (Joust, Gorf, Berzerk), but the collection now is a fraction of what it started as.

    2. Re:Cue lawyers in five... four... by Willard+B.+Trophy · · Score: 1

      aaand it's down. A hollow voice says “Cloantoooo”

  5. How is this legal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    How is any of this legal? The listed games "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, King's Quest and Double Dragon" are definitely still copyrighted.

    Even if you're playing them in a browser from someone else's computer, that seems essentially the same as what Aereo was sued for doing with antenna signals.

  6. Heck by symes · · Score: 1

    I was supposed to be doing things. Now I'm decades old game and having fun.

  7. what about the kickstart roms? and amaiga os? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    what about the kickstart roms? and Amiga os? looks like they are using aros

  8. Re: Link to best of list by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

    One very early Amiga game had generated / algorithmic music... can't recall the name... Anyone?

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  9. Re:Link to best of list by grub · · Score: 2


    Thank you! I didn't know there was a version of Tempest with a pair of hands holding the playing field open. Amazing that they could do that with vector graphics.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  10. Re:Just between you and me by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

    Strictly speaking, 320x200 and 320x256 weren't interlaced. They just refreshed half the scanlines twice as often, while totally ignoring the other half. In modern parlance, they were "200p60" and "256p50".

    That's also why a lot of first-generation LCD TVs had problems displaying 320x200 or 320x256 from old computers and videogames. It was technically never an official video mode, and the fact that it worked was just a lucky side-effect of the way CRTs operated.

    Nifty trivia: through clever CPU timing, someone semi-recently discovered that you can coax a c64, Vic-20, or 8-bit Atari into displaying interlaced graphics at double the vertical resolution by manually changing a register (and the video ram pointers) at the right moment to make the display THINK you're about to send it the even scanlines (instead of sending the odd lines again).

  11. algorithmic music by Layzej · · Score: 1

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?

    1. Re:algorithmic music by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      Thanks, but no. It was a little pixelated character moving over a vast-ish landscape. Had some very basic, but very spacey and moody, procedural background music. I've been trying to think of it on and off ever since I saw this post. Drawing a blank. Sigh. Old.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    2. Re: algorithmic music by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      No, not that one either.

      very early. a1000 time frame.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    3. Re: algorithmic music by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      No. It was a spacey mood, run-across-a-landscape thing with background music of slowish notes that constantly mutated.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  12. Mostly junk... by PhantomHarlock · · Score: 3, Informative

    I played with and also searched for various titles. Mostly it is endless demo scene disks, demo versions of games and many of them don't work properly. The ones that do load play sound erratically, the emulator timing ramps up and down like a record with variable speed playback.

    There were some really amazing games on the Amiga, and you're not going to get the sense of what it was like here. No Psygnosis games, and I couldn't get even the Turrican Demo to work properly. Plus no options that I can see for scanline emulation, the line doubling looks pretty bad and doesn't present what it actually looked like on a CRT monitor.

    The fascinating thing which is hard to realize now is that when games like "Shadow of the Beast" came out in 1986, the PC / DOS crowd was still largely on 16 color CGA with no sound beyond beeps and clicks unless you bought an expensive add on sound card like a Turtle beach. The Macintosh was just discovering color. We were enjoying arcade quality graphics and sound as far back as the Amiga 1,000 thanks to a set of discreet graphics and sound chips. (Paula, Agnes, Denise etc.) It was heady times and a great time to be an Amiga user, from the mid-80s till the early 90s.

    1. Re:Mostly junk... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You had to spend several times the amount of money on IBM PC compatibles, with their cheap performance and costly expansions, to get the same kind of experience the Amiga had out of the box. It wasn't until the release of Windows 95 that the IBM PC had definitely surpassed the Amiga in both software, absolute performance, and performance per price.

  13. Missing some key titles by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 1

    No Marble Madness and no Clown-o-mania. I'll go back to work now.

  14. Re:Atari ST by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 1

    LMOL....good one :)

  15. Re:B L A Z E M O N G E R! by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    Of course they don't. No modern screen can display its awesome 64Kx64K graphics with one color (black).

  16. Re:Link to best of list by hoggoth · · Score: 1

    Are you referring to Goatse-Tempest?

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  17. Xenon 2 in browser with music! by MarkH · · Score: 1

    You stars archive.org

  18. Mech Battle ... by Keybounce · · Score: 1

    So I found two different versions of the all-time great game, ... mech battle? Mechforce?

    A little searching showed that it had two different names over time (fasa lawsuit perhaps?): Mechforce, and Battleforce.

    I *really* wanted to play it.

    Sadface; two different versions, and neither would work. One did not give any icons inside the disk window; the other gave the icons, but the main game does not launch.

    This is the game that could have really redefined mech combat games. It showed just how badly designed the FASA mech designs were -- and how much the turn-based heat usage of that game was broken.

    Simple actions on your turn that would not give you any heat problems with FASA's rules were nightmarishly hot when you have real "heat over time" mechanics -- and the techniques for operating your mech had to change.

  19. Late to the party by GunR · · Score: 3, Informative

    Damn.

    "After a beta-testing period, the emulated Amiga programs at the Archive have been taken down for further development. Thanks to everyone for testing the Amiga In-Browser emulation package during the beta period, and especially a thank you to the Scripted Amiga Emulator project, as well as db48x and bai, for all the hard work with this experiment."