DOS_deck: Play DOS games in the browser with full controller support | Hacker News Reader

DOS_deck: Play DOS games in the browser with full controller support

dosdeck.com

267 pointswsc98153 comments

The site says all the games offered are shareware, freeware, demo versions, or "liberated" (i.e. officially released as freeware after they became commercially unviable). Most of the currently listed games are shareware from id Software or Apogee (or both), and I recall hearing about Command & Conquer being released as freeware at one point, but I'm surprised to see Dune II and The Black Cauldron on that list — I feel like I would have heard about Dune II being released, and I can't imagine The Mouse giving up any control over intellectual property, even something as mostly-forgotten as The Black Cauldron.

A few of these are still for sale on gog.com and should probably be removed as you say it doesn't seem super legit right now.

If I was the author, I'd make it clear it's all demo versions and actually source these versions instead of full games. Shows the proof of concept without entering legal issues.

The ones I tried (Jazz Jackrabbit and Epic Megagames) were not full versions. So nothing wrong there.

Great! It's only been five minutes and I'm addicted to Dune II again.

I'll never understand what it was about that game that made me play it for hours on end as a kid. I suppose if I had learned more about, even rudimentary, real-time strategy games I may have ended up more of a gamer.

It's so weird how much better these games looked in my memory (e.g., Dune 2, C&C). I guess when the graphics were so primitive, your imagination filled in the rest. When I look at them now, I realize that units were just a handful of pixels. Then again, I'm looking at it on a 6k 30" LCD screen, when back then I had an 18" CRT.

The CRT effect makes a night-and-day difference. The art was not designed with perfect, crisp square pixels in mind at all. You can reproduce the effect in Dosbox with Auto-CRT; if you're so inclined, eXoDOS just released v6 a few weeks ago which bundles CRT shader configurations for every single game in the collection. Or if you know how to use ReShade.

Ironically, you would need something like an 8K display at 144Hz+ to fully reproduce the visual effect of a CRT, which basically doesn't exist yet. But even with just 4K the filters make a huge, huge difference.

Cool, I’ll try that out.

This feels like a case where real-time upscaling would make a world of difference.

"Zoom. Enhance."

There is a device (for $750) that is probably worth buying - https://twitter.com/8bitesquire/status/1724518121174618281

Why buy a $750 FPGA that emulates a CRT when you can buy a $20 CRT?

Or a $0 pixel shader?

It depends on the customer :) - I agree with you both, especially on the shader, though I don't think you can find reliable CRT under $200 (maybe?) - I was lucky and found one for free dropped as garbage outside someones house. But it's rare to find such.

The main thing is portability (move to another studio, etc. - just carry the device). The customer - lol, kids nowadays want to make old effects.

You can still find a complete Pentium computer for even less.

I remember playing Dune 2 and having a blast. Later played the c&c series and also had a blast.

Then went back to Dune 2, and oh boy those controls were terrible! You get used to new things so fast that you forget how it was before.

I remember that most with renegade x to renegade thinking it's basically the same graphics wise in my minds eye but nooo.

There are good shaders that emulate CRT. Without them, games look like horse*

My kids are playing Monkey Island 2 this week, and its the opposite. I remember it being pixelated (and it is) but the backdrops are astonishingly pretty, the colors vibrant, the animation quirky and fun.

(And no, I'm not playing the remastered version)

See also, based on same js-dos code

https://dos.zone/

https://js-dos.com/v7/build/docs/

On my machine both websites seem to run the emulators much choppier in Firefox than in Chrome. Does it use any JS features that Firefox is known to be slow at, or should I suspect a difference in hardware acceleration of rendering the image?

Would love to see more of these websites implement the JS-DOS on-screen keyboards configurations to allow games w/ key shortcuts (like, say, Civilization) to be played on touchscreen devices.

The name got me excited, but I'm definitely in the market for a smoother platform for DOSBox on my SteamDeck. The machine is genuinely excellent for retro gaming because it's so easy to map the mouse and various keyboard shortcuts to its many buttons, and that's increasingly become how I use it instead of more modern games out of Steam. Only issue is there is some faff involved at the moment (but faff that I'm delighted is even possible, it being a full Linux machine and all).

Extremely responsive interface on Firefox and Chromium. How do you achieve that? Well done.

I love jazz the jackrabbit, thanks for this. Any way to save the game

The image is distorted and squashed, because the aspect ratio is wrong. It should be 4:3, but it is closer to 16:10.

I'm not so sure about it. Yes it's 16:10, but a few games I played, they look fine to me, not squashed.

Without a solid reference it's hard to tell, but the cursor in C&C is definitely a perfect circle: https://i.imgur.com/f3SZD3t.png so it's at least not squashed at canvas/screen level.

And stretching any screenshots to 4:3 (I tried a few in Photoshop) definitely is more distorted.

As far as C&C is concerned, that looks correct.

I have noticed that a lot of people don’t notice when a video or image is squashed or stretched to the wrong aspect ratio. They simply don’t see it, and aren’t bothered by it even it is pointed out and they agree. So anyone saying that they don’t see anything wrong is, sadly, not an indication of correctness. What is an indication is if there are any people (like me, and commenter glhaynes), who do notice it.

Looking at The Black Cauldron, which I'm very familiar with, it's stretched and manually resizing to 4:3 looks right. I think the thing is, the rendered image isn't being stretched, but the problem is that it _should_ be: because the 320×200 resolution that this is emulating has non-square pixels on the 4:3 displays it was displayed on. Essentially everything today uses square ones. It'd need to be 320×240 to have square pixels on a 4:3 display.

As to why the cursor in C&C is a perfect circle: I'm guessing it's because the C&C authors didn't adjust for non-square pixels. So it would've looked slightly-taller than a perfect circle on original hardware.

Lots of games can be played on archive.org too https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games like https://archive.org/details/Keen4e-sw

https://play-cs.com/

Curious what the future looks like for DOS and old Win95 emulation. I cant seem to run some old games from back then with just dosbox.

I don't try hard and there are likely solutions, but given what has happend with AI and how that has transformed other data hording, I'm excited about the future.

PCem or 86box, though they have much higher system requirements.

I can wait patiently for better hardware. :)

I mean they work fine, you just have to have a high (single-threaded) performance CPU to emulate something like a Pentium II or III.

Look at eXoDOS.

Now the question is how do you do effective profiling for this kind of project? The performance is a little iffy.

Related: https://dos.lol

This is amazing. I've always wanted to go back to Commander Keen with a gamepad.

The pogo stick jump in Keens 1-3 took a lot of getting used to and one still tended to fail at it quite a bit, on keyboard. I hadn’t thought about it before, but yeah, I bet it’s much easier on a gamepad.

supaplex is in there. I wanted to write this 2 hours ago. help!

very slick - i'd forgotten the horrible heretic music

Its MIDI though so it depends on the sound card being used. They are using Adlib emulation so its not the best sounding.

Using something better like a Roland SoundCanvas it does not sound that bad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if6n3QIJqbs

Really? I always thought the e1l1 track was banging.

Doom has more memorable music overall though.

I wonder how can I disable the command key on my mac....

Possibly karbiner but I've never looked into doing specifically that, so I may be wrong https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

I use it to map a ton of stuff on my Moonlander layers and my razer tartarus.

cant play heretic on desktop :/ because on mac when you shoot and press left or right mac os bring all windows front of you like you press F3

Very cool! I've built a similar platform for GB, GBA and SNES at https://afterplay.io I've thought about adding DOS support in the future. What emulator did you end up using? Very nice implementation :)

There's an About tab.

DOSBox allowed these classic games to run, but it required installation on a computer, limiting accessibility. Fortunately, the magic of modern web technology came to the rescue. Some ingenious individuals managed to make DOSBox run within a web browser, giving rise to the marvelous software package known as JS-DOS.

DOS_deck is built upon the foundation of JS-DOS, which, in turn, relies on DOSBox. Together, they breathe new life into MS-DOS games by bringing them to your browser. However, there's a twist. Games from that era were designed for keyboard and mouse input, without established standards for interaction or control patterns. Here at DOS_deck, a tremendous effort was put into creating a seamless experience, enabling you to effortlessly navigate and play these games, ideally with the comfort of a controller in hand. Rediscover a golden age of gaming with DOS_deck. It's the bridge between the past and the present, connecting you to a world of digital memories and timeless adventures.

Your site is great. I've signed up and I'm using it now to re-play EarthBound. Thanks.

Thank you so much. EarthBound is awesome. I played it for the first when I added SNES to Afterplay. Are you playing on desktop or mobile?

I'm playing on desktop. I tried to play in Firefox's private mode, but the emulator didn't load. I don't know if this is intended or a bug, but just thought I'd let you know.

Ah it looks like Firefox in private mode doesn't support indexed db with is used for storing the games locally and for auth. I should add some error message for that case :) Thank you for reporting. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1639542

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