EXoDOS: Collecting every game developed for DOS from original media
exodos.the-eye.us
exodos.the-eye.us
I prefer the philosophy of “TDC”, the Total DOS Collection, which in most cases is simply the original install media in a zip file.
Even better is to image the disks and provide a FAT file system image for each floppy disk.
To quote Internet Archive's Jason Scott, "I wouldn't use a Kryoflux to pry open my last can of beans."
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/ti...
IA's Archive Team have guidance for anyone wanting to archive floppy disks:
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...
and optical discs:
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_optical...
From the links provided, the issue is regarding documentation of the image “flux” file format and the availability of software tools to manipulate the images. Jason Scott probably doesn’t want to use a proprietary format for archival of disk images, and that’s fine. For someone to say that Kyroflux is claiming ownership of images created by its customers, however, is just misleading.
I think the answer then would be to come up with an alternative that works on approximately the same level.
Working with disk images allows recovering "deleted" contents, or otherwise recovering data from "slack space" (say, if a file was edited and shortened, the data after the new end of the file in the final sector is likely still present).
Wow, this is a weird point of pride. So, you’re making a new scene rip? Better to just give everyone an image of original media along with some patches if you want.
The Golden Flute 4 was the name of the game
The outliers are interesting to me too:
Adventureland (1978)
Beneath Apple Manor (1978)
Pirate Adventure (1978)
Mission Impossible (1979)
Dungeons of Noudar 3D (2018)
Encroaching Gloom, The (2018)
MagiDuck (2018)
Planet X3 (2018)
Sigil (2019)
Thanks for posting this, will certainly check some of these out.
It's a long one, but it tries to answer when the first video game was made. Most of it, though, is trying to figure out what it means to be a video game in the first place. Sometimes really the trouble with the question is the lack of precision in the definitions involved.
> The focus is on games that were either released in English
Oh. So not "every game" at all.
What's also really nice is the catalog they made for it: http://exodos.the-eye.us/public/eXoDOS%20Catalog.pdf
Edit: Oh I now see that it had an English release. The version I had was Japanese or Korean and was tricky to navigate the menus.
Still it was fairly animeish and had a cool soundtrack from what I remember
I've been searching for years to find an early multiplayer DOS lan game (~1990) that I believe was called 'Trek'. You separately controlled multiple ships to protect your base and attack others. It was basic ascii graphics but my friends & co-workers spent hours playing via local lan setup.
Hoping it's in this collection!
Such a great game for its time. Edit: it's modem <-> modem not LAN so a max of 2 human players. So I assume we were using null modems to play together in the same room.
Seems likely that this Carlton McLawhorn [i] from Wendell NC is the author (and also an avid rocketeer and scoutmaster).
[i] https://stricklandfuneral.com/carlton-carl-bruce-mclawhorn/
(For reference: https://www.mobygames.com/game/harpoon )
Edit: I'm now sure that's it. I even found a scan of the original gaming magazine (the German "PC Player") with the test I read back then.
There are two parts I remember very clearly. The first is that you have the choice when you leave the house at the beginning of either bringing along a walking stick or something else, and if you don't choose the stick, there's a part on an outdoor trail where you twist your ankle and lose the game.
The other part I remember is getting shrunk somehow and ending up in a drawer full of drinking straws. You have to work your way through this tube maze, but some of the straws are clear (invisible) and if you wander into one accidentally, the game lets you know it was so narrow that you get stuck in it forever, lose the game, and die.
It was a brown-ish DOS platformer, I remember it was distributed (to me) as "mario" even though it was not a Mario clone. Probably EGA graphics? The most similar one I've seen is one of the Dangerous Dave games, but I don't think it was that! It's not "Monuments of Mars" either.
Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it, or maybe it was a small project someone made and never properly released.
edit - "Rick Dangerous" looks similar too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNEgrJ9wejo
Nahklah was a favorite of mine, but it is not procedurally generated either.
That's how I learned to spell the word "necklace"
The key different of course is that mid-80's DOS software is more-or-less obsolete and abandoned for a reason (the computer history community notwithstanding, of which I'm a part), whereas public libraries are filled with books that still retain almost as much value as they day they were written.
Not legally. I doubt very much the copyright holders of all of these games have allowed their use in this manner.
It could be much smaller and stream those dynamically, but the creator is more focused on the archival and preservation than optimizing the download size.
Did anyone else think of Ultima 3 when they went to their page?
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61%2Bvy7oGO...
Does anyone know if those games come with the manual? In the 1980's DRM was implemented something like "What is the third word in paragraph 3 on page 14 of the manual?" I see several games in there that I remember having this type of protection.
If I run a DOS MZ executable infected with a virus that attempts to flash my BIOS, will that affect the host computer?
- A program running inside DOSBox sees the DOSBox BIOS, not the host computer's BIOS
- Even the host computer's BIOS was visible, the host computer's OS is responsible for preventing random programs (including DOSBox) from poking directly at hardware
- I'm pretty sure DOS viruses generally predate flashable BIOS, and even if there was a DOS virus that tried to flash your BIOS, it wouldn't know what to do with a modern UEFI setup
Good times.
They have a DMCA page, but their philosophy seems to be "put it all out there and wait for the DMCA notices." Disingenuous at best since they must know ahead of time that they are violating a lot of IP. It's one thing to be against our global IP laws. It's another thing to flagrantly disregard them. You can be against something without violating it.
How does archive.org get around this with their software collection?
This seems more fair than having to obtain specific clearance for every work that may fall under copyright (Project Gutenberg has had to tolerate doing this for decades [3]).
> You can be against something without violating it.
Off topic: Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws. Copyright law has become too draconian and infringes on the public good, therefore some don’t respect it. This doesn’t mean content creators shouldn’t get paid.
Disclaimer: No affiliation with the Internet Archive. Words and thoughts are my own.
[1] https://toucharcade.com/2015/10/29/new-dmca-exemption-takes-...
[2] https://copyright.gov/1201/2015/fedreg-publicinspectionFR.pd...
It's worth noting that in the United States, a lot of civil disobedience that has happened, and is happening now, is built on legal reasoning that the unjust laws in question are also unconstitutional, since our constitution explicitly grants many rights to US citizens.
This also affords a way to commit civil disobedience in good conscience for those whose religion or personal convictions forbid disobedience to civil authority.
Those sources indicate the DMCA exemption is only for single player games requiring online activation where the server is no longer available. That is probably a tiny subset of "abandoned" DOS games.
From a comment about two years ago:
“I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but looking at the Wikipedia page for the DMCA [0] there appears to be protection for retro games:
An exemption was made for 'Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.'
EDIT: Actually archive.org posted an article about exactly this [1]”
See the link for citations. My understanding is that there are a combination of factors that coincide to provide a safe harbor for the Internet Archive to serve this content.
My point is that several of these titles are not abandonware since they are still being sold by original publishers on GOG.com
> Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws. Copyright law has become too draconian and infringes on the public good, therefore some don’t respect it. This doesn’t mean content creators shouldn’t get paid.
Big difference between civil disobedience being justified by laws restricting fundamental rights (e.g. voting rights) and civil disobedience because you want to play an old game. Extreme measures (e.g. breaking laws) should be reserved for big injustices IMHO.
As a platform, you aren't required to proactively investigate the copyright status of works uploaded to your platform by the general public. If you leave it up until you get a DMCA takedown request, and promptly remove it if and when the DMCA takedown request arrives, then the DMCA safe-harbor provisions apply.
Any of these original publishers can legally serve a DMCA notice on the Internet Archive, and the Internet Archive will I'm sure promptly respond by removing public access to the material (they will keep it archived so they can restore public access when one day the copyright expires, or if the copyright owners have a future change of heart before then). The fact that those publishers haven't means that either they don't care about what the Internet Archive is doing to their copyrighted works, or possibly even some of them tacitly approve of it.
If commercial entities reason like that, and quite often (even if not always) get away with reasoning like that, what is wrong with a not-for-profit entity doing the same? If anything, the fact that its motivations are philanthropic rather than commercial makes it engaging in that kind of reasoning even more defensible.