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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.

15 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.

  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?

  3. 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.

  4. 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,
  5. 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).

  6. 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.

  7. 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."