
More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Internet Archive - sohkamyung
https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/13/2500-more-ms-dos-games-playable-at-the-archive/
======
leshokunin
Disclaimer: I'm loosely involved with the Archive, helping with the DWeb
Meetup.

I love this. The Archive has been helping emulation a lot, but hosting full
rom sets, and javascript-based emulators. It's a great fit with the idea of
video game preservation.

MS-DOS games are an interesting problem: on one hand, Dosbox is very powerful,
on the other hand, it does require a good chunk of familiarity with the
original platform. After all, who's going to know to run setup.exe, what IRQ
and DMA are? Thankfully I've never ran into the EMS and XMS fun, but I can
imagine that some aspects of DOS would feel very arcane to younger people.

So for the Archive to make those games available, easily playable, it's a
whole chunk of older computer knowledge that's being made available to all.

~~~
Moru
For us using other computer brands at that time, EMS and XMS felt arcane
already then...

~~~
organsnyder
It felt arcane for those of us who were daily MS-DOS users, as well.

I remember when I first installed QEMM, which addressed these issues in novel
ways. It wasn't perfect, but it made things much more pleasant.

------
contingencies
An awesome underrated game from the MS-DOS era was Quarantine[0] (cyberpunk
cab driving with super gore, funny writing and fantastic soundtrack). It was
difficult to run due to EMS and free memory requirements.

[0]
[https://www.myabandonware.com/game/quarantine-2a8/play-2a8](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/quarantine-2a8/play-2a8)

~~~
myself248
I cite Quarrantine all the time, its logo was a master stroke of design,
combining a steering wheel, the biohazard logo, and the letter Q.

You're spot-on about the soundtrack, too It was one of the first games that
came on CDROM and used mixed-mode to put CD-DA tracks after the data track.
Once the game was running, you could swap discs and listen to your own music,
but the included tunes (from some Australian band, I believe) were great.

~~~
DrOctagon
A few years ago I tried to get to the bottom of how Quarantine (made in
Canada) ended up with a soundtrack of independent Aussie bands. Great bands,
but bands that had a niche following, even in Australia, at the time.

I only got silence and a couple of shrugs in response to my emails though.

------
arcboii92
The most viewed game at the time I post this comment:

Leisure Suit Larry 6

A huge archive of playable games from a wonderful era, and everyone rushed for
the 8 bit tiddies.

~~~
doctorpangloss
To be fair, that game is going places no AAA title in existence today will go.
So it’s debatable that anyone visiting that archive will have experienced a
contemporary, mainstream game that does the same themes. It even makes the
most sense for Archive.org, because the Apple App Store would never allow that
game.

While I personally find nudity and sex conquest games pretty stupid, and I
recognize there are a lot of interesting boundary pushing indie titles out
there, it does show how utterly dead games distribution and production has
gotten if people find Leisure Suit Larry in Archive.org interesting enough to
try.

~~~
tus88
Isn't Steam full of games that would make Larry blush? I thought it was a mjor
point of controversy. True they are not AAA titles, but it's not like the
options aren't there.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Yeah but skewed towards Japanese anime-eque visual novels, plus a lot of low
hanging fruit, like tetris... but naked.

Source: had a roommate/former coworker that was deep into that rabbit hole.

------
W-Stool
To all the people that help make this happen: you are truly the heroes the
world needs right now. A thousand thanks.

~~~
moreorless
A small donation will go a long way.

~~~
ZoomStop
Their donate page says they host 45 PB of data (45k GB). That is a mind
boggling amount of data to have available online and can't be cheap. This is
absolutely a cause worth donating to.

~~~
jaynetics
45 PB is approx. 45 _million_ GB, or 45k TB, or 3000 of the largest HDDs
available, or 2 metric tonnes of state-of-the-art hard drives.

~~~
jonah-archive
It's not all on the largest available disks -- currently the primary copy
occupies around 9300 hard drives.

~~~
jaynetics
Wow. Is there a page with more information?

I found this picture where they'd just bought a few hundred brand new 4 TB
drives:
[https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Incoming_additiona...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Incoming_additional_storage_at_Internet_Archive.jpg)

~~~
jonah-archive
Oh wow, hadn't seen that one -- that was in the aftermath of the 2011 Thailand
floods that seriously impacted hard drive availability, there was almost
nothing in the supply channel so we had to shuck external drives.

Sadly there's not really a great one-stop page for this kind of info --
[https://archive.org/web/petabox.php](https://archive.org/web/petabox.php)
exists but is sadly outdated (I'll see about rewriting it sometime). We do
public tours on Friday afternoons of the main office/datacenter (and our big
annual event is coming up next Wednesday if you happen to be in the Bay Area:
[https://www.eventbrite.com/e/world-night-market-the-
internet...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/world-night-market-the-internet-
archives-annual-bash-tickets-73912162267) )

------
merty
Impressive how well MS-DOS games stood to the test of time. I still find them
much more enjoyable than modern games.

Well, since the topic is relevant, a quick question to those who know their
MS-DOS games well...

The other day, I was trying to remember an MS-DOS game in which you were a
Pac-man like character that was eating chips on a motherboard or something.
For some reason I recall the name of the game as “Yep” but nothing turned out
when I searched for it. Any ideas?

~~~
salicideblock
Supaplex, maybe?

~~~
merty
Yes, that’s the one!

Thank you so much!

~~~
Macuyiko
If you're looking for a great Windows remake that keeps the original style,
check out Megaplex. Apparently the original website is gone, but archive has
it as well:

[https://archive.org/details/MegaPlex_1020](https://archive.org/details/MegaPlex_1020)

Supaplex is even on Steam, but probably not linked to the original creators,
which have declared the game as freeware.

~~~
babuskov
If you really want to play those games, I recommend you install Rocks and
Diamonds, which implements Supaplex, Boulder Dash, Emerald Mine and Sokoban
and even has some additional content. It's open source:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocks%27n%27Diamonds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocks%27n%27Diamonds)

There are versions for Windows, Linux, Mac.

------
fireattack
>Digger from 1983 is a Dig-Dug-Clone-but-Not that came out right as IBM PCs
were starting to take off, and it’s a lovely little game

I used to play this a lot. But is it really a dig-dug (1982) clone? It looks
closer to Mr. Do! (also 1982) to me.

~~~
romwell
That was my first game, played it on a 286 or similar in what could still have
been the USSR (or right after it was gone).

IIRC, it had a PC-speaker rendition of Popcorn by Hot Butter as a soundtrack.

Still one of my favorite tunes!

~~~
Intermernet
One of my first games as well. You're correct about the popcorn soundtrack

~~~
degenerate
Yep, my first game too, and I remember the song. When I heard the popcorn song
many years later in life, I was stopped dead in my tracks because it stirred
nearly the oldest memory I had stored in my head.

------
mgraczyk
Wow, used to play so many of these with my siblings as a kid. My dad made us
an 80486 machine with CRT monitor, IBM keyboard, and speaker all in one giant
wooden box. The "white computer" must have weighed 60 pounds. Good times.

------
dspillett
Surely for most CD-ROM games of that era some sort of cached streaming would
help greatly.

For those that actually had large chunks of data not CDDA audio, i.e. those
with FMVs on the CD, the speed of many Internet connections these days is
greater than I got out of a local CD-ROM in the mid 90s especially when the
latency of spin up time is considered. Streaming the data on request might
feel faster than the local physical drive did back then, and avoids
transferring the whole disk just to play the first part of the game. It might
even make multi-CD games that started appeating in the mid 90, like Wing
Commander III, practical to run this way. Of course you still need to
implement some simulation of a disk swap.

For many the game was relatively small with CD music tracks making up most of
the CD - these could be compressed (MP3/similar) and transmitted that way to
be unpacked in the emulator at the other side. Thsi would make the payload
much smaller than a full CD so make the games more practical even without
trying to stream them.

------
staz
As a non-American, this helped me finally play that "Oregon Trail" I heard so
much about on the Internet, cause apparently every American teenager had to
play it at some point.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
If you played the DOS version, you played the wrong one. We all played the
Apple II version in schools.

~~~
acheron
The DOS and Apple II versions are identical. (There was a later "Deluxe"
version for DOS that was more like the Mac version.)

~~~
dannypgh
Are you sure this is true? I recall the DOS hunting feature using the keyboard
to navigate and shoot, whereas the Apple II version used a mouse. It's
/possible/ I'm confusing the Apple II version with the Mac version?

I remember playing the Apple IIc version in school and the DOS version at home
around 1994, and noting this as the difference.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
The Apple II version definitely used the keyboard.

------
minitoar
If you're up for something a little different, might I recommend:
[https://archive.org/details/msdos_I_Have_No_Mouth_and_I_Must...](https://archive.org/details/msdos_I_Have_No_Mouth_and_I_Must_Scream_1995)

~~~
depressedpanda
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is also available on both Steam and GoG.

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/245390/I_Have_No_Mouth_an...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/245390/I_Have_No_Mouth_and_I_Must_Scream/)

[https://www.gog.com/game/i_have_no_mouth_and_i_must_scream](https://www.gog.com/game/i_have_no_mouth_and_i_must_scream)

------
Eduard
What is the legal status of these?

------
silvester23
I cannot recommend Albion[1] enough, it's a story-driven RPG set in a
beautifully designed world that -- with some limitations -- still holds up
today.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Albion_1995](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Albion_1995)

------
brownbat
The CD ROM problem is interesting - a lot of my favorites were playing around
with full motion video back then. We complained about load times even locally
and scoffed at the idea discs would ever replace cartridges in consoles.

Might be just the problem that >Gbps internet was searching for.

~~~
mike_hock
Or a download + dosbox were searching for.

A 700MB download is a non-issue. An _implicit_ 700MB download _every time_ you
wanna play is insane.

~~~
sjburt
Perhaps the answer is just to intercept disk reads and stream on demand; 52x
CD (fastest common speed) was only 6.3mb/sec and computers only had a few MB
of RAM. Spread out over many hours of gameplay that’s not much at all. Later
games that expected to be copied on entirety to the HDDn are a different
matter, although I remember few of those. Honestly most games were a few tens
of MB of game data and the rest were CDDA tracks. This was before mp3 and
lossy audio compression became commonplace.

~~~
kungtotte
Circa late 90s a common feature was full or partial installs. A full install
would copy everything to disk, but partial installs commonly kept the video
and music files still on the CD.

------
Pxtl
Oh wow, WipEout 1 and VR slingshot. I remember sinking so much time into both
of those.

~~~
josu
Pro Pinball Timeshock is my favorite pinball game.

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pro_Pinball_-
_Timeshock_19...](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pro_Pinball_-
_Timeshock_1997)

------
malkia
Occasionally I keep replaying Apple ][ games :) - like Karateka :) - Love the
site!

------
anonymousiam
What a blast from the past! The first game in the linked archive (Davidson's
Zoo Keeper) was my GF's (at the time) first project at Davidson. Firefox under
Linux had no trouble rendering it (sound included)!

------
acheron
My first game was the Friendlyware PC Arcade, which is up there now. It's a
bunch of clones of coin-op arcade games done in ASCII/CP-437 graphics. The
Frogger clone "Hopper" is most memorable for me. I still love anything done
with CP-437.

For quite awhile it was hard to find on the "abandonware" sites, probably
because it was a PC booter disk. I did find it eventually and have it saved.
Nice to see it up on the archive now too. (I also have the original 5.25"
floppy, but no drive to read it.)

------
MagnumPIG
I have very vague memories of a game where you played... I think it was a
barbarian? I remember the weapon could be upgraded but I don't remember how!
The graphics looked basic even for the time.

Any ideas?

~~~
Herodotus38
Total shot in the dark:

Dark Ages

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(1991_video_game)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_\(1991_video_game\))

~~~
MagnumPIG
Yeeeesss thank you!

I remember dying a lot, wonder if the game is actually hard now... I'll check
it out :)

~~~
Herodotus38
No problem! For some reason it was the first thing I thought of. I have good
memories watching my dad play it and trying to as well.

------
pjmlp
Many thanks for keeping these games alive for newer generations.

A few of my favorite ones are there.

\- Ace

\- Ace of the Deep

\- Battle Chess

\- Spitfire

\- Space Quest

\- Laser Squad

\- Last Ninja

\- Loom

\- Commander Keen series

\- Game Over

\- F-15 Strike Eagle

\- Fallout

~~~
aidenn0
+1 for Loom.

If you haven't played Loom, play it. It's a fairly short game, so not a huge
time commitment, but very different and quite fun. Also, it is easily the best
looking EGA game of all time, which is a technical achievement all in its own.

~~~
WorldMaker
Still sad that the teased sequel(s) to Loom never made it past the pitch
stage. Also, if you love Loom, Brian Moriarty's three Infocom (text)
adventures are worth playing.

------
rootw0rm
Strike Commander or bust!

I don't know if there's an actual need or not, but if any reverse engineering
work is needed on retro titles, I'd happily donate my time. email is in
profile.

~~~
aidenn0
Haha, strike commander. I legally purchased Strike Commander, but then pirated
Quarterdeck QEMM386 because the game was not stable with the MS EMM386.

It was also either that game, or master of magic, that I had to use the Novell
(purchased from Digital Research) nwcdex rather than the mscdex because the
former used less conventional RAM, and getting the CDROM driver loaded while
still having the over 600KB required conventional memory free was challenging.

------
unixhero
They put all of the ExoDOS collection readily emulated, out there? Maaan
that's a big contribution. Thank you Archive.org!

~~~
elweston
Also should shout out to eXo and his team. They have spent the past year
making this work. eXo before that has spent many years alone making it work.
It is a little rough around the edges due to the cut and paste job they did
with their launcher/install system. But they did an amazing job of 'just
works'. Looking forward to the next win3x pack.

------
jim-greer
I hope they support flash game someday.

~~~
Something1234
So many of the flash games I want to play require a server.

Anybody remember battledawn?

------
chungy
There is something disturbing about the apparent disregard to legality of this
project, if I'm being honest. there might be a better case if it didn't
include games like Doom, SimCity, and Star Trek Judgment Rites (to name a few
examples I checked for) that are still being actively sold (eg, on Steam and
GOG)

~~~
zozbot234
The Internet Archive is an officially-recognized archiving institution, and
can thus take a few extra liberties when it comes to preserving copyrighted
materials that others would be unable to. It's quite clear to me that if we
want the bulk of 'orphaned' content from that era to be preserved, that's only
going to happen via some 'disregard' of legally-imposed constraints.

~~~
chungy
None of the games I mentioned are orphaned in any sense of the word, and that
was the point I'm making.

~~~
Crinus
None of the games in currently the archive were orphaned when people
originally shared them around either, but for the vast majority of them they
wouldn't exist anymore nowadays if it wasn't for that original sharing.

Even GOG had to hunt around abandonware sites for officially lost materials.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
> they wouldn't exist anymore nowadays if it wasn't for that original sharing

Exactly, more often than not the people who own the rights to things can't be
trusted to maintain them.

See the same thing happen with movies, the version available in stores from
the rights owner is a bad transfer, likely with a crop with hardcoded
subtitles. Yet the version online, compiled by a passionate individual because
they care for the material has a rip from a laserdisc for best uncropped
picture, sound from another cut and softcoded subtitles.

