More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Internet Archive

blog.archive.org

429 pointssohkamyung97 comments

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.

That's the great thing with Dosbox though, it means a consistent experience for what was probably the least consistent consumer gaming platform.

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

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.

> 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.

Yeah, game playing as a young person in that era was wild. I recall at one point I had an entire bootloader full of multiple choices of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS pairs based on which EMS or XMS needs I had. Some games would require one config, others a second, Windows 3.11 sometimes a third, (then when I had OS/2 installed, that was yet another set boot options).

Then there were fun crazy things like: boot into Win 3.11, for its protected mode fixes to activate (not that I knew at that age that's what was the magic, that's a more recent learning), immediately quit Windows, then the launch the game.

(Similarly, there were at least a couple games that I recall ran better in a DOS window in OS/2 than anywhere else. Again, probably fun combinations of protected mode fixes and EMS/XMS management TSRs built into OS/2 versus the other commercial ones games were often bundled with, or should have been bundled with but forgot or packaged an ancient broken version because it was cheaper…)

So much of it at the age I was doing all of that was trial-and-error based almost solely on obscure error messages and trial-and-error. I remember being really proud of my boot-loader scripts saving multiple configs and making it easier to switch between them, rather than what a lot other people I knew were doing of just constantly changing their one set of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and having no idea what last worked for some previous games and always trying for some lowest common denominator that ran the most things they could as best as possible. (I had to maintain some of those types of configs for a couple labs I was unpaid labor for, but that's another set of tales.)

It's kind of fun looking back and having a slightly better idea of the "magic" behind a lot of the trial-and-error, though as much as I can reminisce about it I also probably wouldn't want to ever do it again. So much better to have emulators automatically deal with that stuff today.

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

It was a technical marvel to my eyes at the time. GTA before GTA.

I loved that game so much.

Ross Scott (the Freeman's Mind guy) made a video about his experience playing it https://youtu.be/abrKxAHJ7qU

My and my older brother loved the game very much as well. We only had the demo but we kept playing it over and over for a very long time.

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.

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.

The meek shall inherit zilch!

That game has a special place in my heart. It's also damn near impossible to run glitch free on anything but a classic dos rig unless something has changed since I last tried. I could never get past the third or fourth map as the pass code did nothing. Very frustrating. But hell it was fun to play. The sequel, Road Warrior, was too buggy for me I remember and I didnt like it for some other reason. If any game needs a remake, it's that one. Omnicorp is all knowing.

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.

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.

From what I remember when I was 14, besides the nudity, the game is still an actual sierra game with good brain wracking puzzles (a bit more unfair and rough than lucasart games) and goofiness...

It pushed boundaries and the theme is not necessarily politically correct but below the surface the game is also good and cannot just be reduced to that

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.

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.

>Isn't Steam full of games that would make Larry blush?

Yes, and also there's porn.

Larry was an actual game, and a great one, at that.

And it never took itself too seriously.

I really don't think this is a reflection of the current games industry. It's people's nostalgia for a game they played when they were fourteen and hormonal.

There's a remake of the original game on the iOS and Macintosh App Stores:

> Now Larry’s original creator, the world-famous game designer Al Lowe, has teamed up with Sierra Veteran Josh Mandel, to bring this amazing, perverted game back to life – updated and expanded in every way imaginable! All we kept from the original game is the plot.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/leisure-suit-larry-reloaded/id...

There's plenty of X-rated content out there, but there's nothing like Leisure Suit Larry.

You've got to give it to Al Lowe[1]: the game was a masterpiece in the best of Sierra's traditions - with a lot of humor, interesting puzzles, and a great soundtrack - and yes, great graphics.

I still remember the theme that you heard when you were in the hotel hallways (AdLib-compatible MIDI rendition on my ES1868 FM soundcard).

Some of the humor in LSL has not aged well, but a lot did.

And there's not anything like LSL today - or even back then. The sort of light-hearted, but high quality art that has some sort of nakedness/"adult" themes (let's be honest, the people who enjoyed LSL the most were teens) seems to comprise solely of LSL series.

[1]http://allowe.com/

Jason Scott here. Just want to mention that if you see any games with over 50 views in the collection, it usually means the game was around previously, but not working and was taken out of circulation, and now the configuration to make it work within the Internet Archive system was complete and it's ready. I also used it as an indication of what people were looking for.

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

A small donation will go a long way.

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.

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.

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

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...

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 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... )

Just FYI, if you donate they'll add you to their spam list. I donated a couple years ago and got some garbage in my mailbox, but they they apologised and said it was unintentional, so fair enough - everyone makes mistakes.

But guess what arrived just a couple weeks ago? Yeah, more trash in my mailbox.

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?

Supaplex, maybe?

Yes, that’s the one!

Thank you so much!

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

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

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

There are versions for Windows, Linux, Mac.

I got this game as part of some shareware compilation disc. One of the earliest games I remember playing! What an absolute banger of a game.

>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.

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!

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

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.

Replace USSR with the Netherlands and we have a similar memory.

Also, apparently that song has a long history in electronic music:

https://www.popcorn-song.com/versions.php

There was also a digger remake, which is now so old that it's also nostalgiaware! https://digger.org/

We had this game but on our IBM PCjr, and something with the hardware config wasn't what the game was expecting which made the sprites scrambled but still in the spot on the screen where they should go. The game was otherwise playable and audio was fine. I didn't see the actual graphics for the game until several years later!

I'll accept that.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Apple II version definitely used the keyboard.

The theme of the game was a big deal around the US bicentennial in 1976. I remember playing this in school then, in 2nd or 3rd grade -- but on paper.

Not all of us. The DOS version was great :-)

If you're up for something a little different, might I recommend: https://archive.org/details/msdos_I_Have_No_Mouth_and_I_Must...

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://www.gog.com/game/i_have_no_mouth_and_i_must_scream

You can even play it on your phone or tablet using SCUMMVM .

What is the legal status of these?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pro Pinball Timeshock is my favorite pinball game.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pro_Pinball_-_Timeshock_19...

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

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)!

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.)

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?

I mean, you've described just about everything from Castle of the Winds to Skyrim (well, maybe not if the graphics were basic.)

If you think of any more of the description, there's a subreddit that's specifically about helping people find obscure games they kinda remember: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmyjoystick/

Total shot in the dark:

Dark Ages

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

worst case this is just a good recommendation

Yeeeesss thank you!

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

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.

It’s not necessarily known mainly as a PC game, but the most common 80s game where you play a barbarian with upgradable weapons in Rastan, originally for arcades in the late 80s.

There's Conan for the Apple //e https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Conan ?

I remember playing Prehistorik games.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prehistorik_1991

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prehistorik_2_1993

I loved the bonus levels in Prehistorik 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4IQ26Y2Zhs

I loved this game on the SNES. And it was just some random game that was in the discount box in the shop.

A long shot, but if I think about an arcade game with a barbarian I cannot think about anything but Rastan (although the graphics was not necessarily basic for the time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFBs3X2LVAc

Targhan maybe?

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Targhan_1989

Maybe this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_(video_game)

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

+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.

My favourite EGA game was The Land (roguelike).

Loom is insanely great.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I hope they support flash game someday.

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

Anybody remember battledawn?

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)

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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