DOS Zone
dos.zone
dos.zone
I also have an instant-run port of Cave Story: https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/. For that one I added cloud save game sync too. Porting classic games to the web is a fun hobby!
Coming up with touchscreen control schemes for these old games is probably the most interesting part. I really like the controls I came up with for both games. For Quake I determined that you really need automatic shooting for touch controls to feel good, but a naive implementation of an automatic trigger makes the railgun into a win button, so I did something a little more complex that I think is fun to use and not unfair. Cave Story was also challenging; at first I wasn't sure I could make a touch control scheme that would be good enough to beat the game, but with the final scheme I was able to play all the way through (at least to the first ending) purely on touch controls. And you can use the cloud save sync to transfer your save game to a PC for the hard parts if you need to.
On a Pentium 75 it can get 30fps and with decoupling the frame timer it plays at the same speed as the original. The port offloads the Organya synth soundtrack to MIDI to improve performance, and also sounds amazing.
Still working on a few bug fixes, performance tweaks, and Waveblaster support, but it's playable.
Left thumb drag (anywhere on left half of screen): D-pad
Right thumb tap/hold: shoot
Right thumb drag (any direction): jump
Tap weapon/health bar: open inventory/map menu
Swipe weapon/health bar left/right: switch weapon
For Quake, the left half of the screen works like a gamepad left stick for movement, and the right half works like a trackpad for aiming. Your weapon will start shooting automatically when an enemy is near the crosshair, even if they are not directly under it, so you need to track enemies accurately over time to score hits without wasting ammo. Tapping the top right quadrant of the screen will shoot manually, which is mostly useful for the rocket launcher. I didn't figure out a scheme to enable jumping or zoom/scope.
One thing I will say is that this so far has NAILED the experience I remember of loading the game. Thinking the PC had frozen, only to finally be greeted with that gorgeous Maxis loading screen and opening animation.
I have not yet determined if the sim speed goes nutso on Cheetah like I remember, but I will edit this when I do.
Coming back to edit and say that this is absolutely unusable, either due to demand or underspecced VMs. I cannot get through laying infrastructure without the entire emulation freezing hard and forcing me to reload the page.
Coming back again to report that I have been trying for an hour and a half to just get past the city creation stage of the game. I can only get to the point of laying infrastructure in 1/10 attempts and I lose all progress every time because I can't save before it crashes. This is woefully underpowered for a simple simulation game, I c a n n o t i m a g i n e h o w s l o w i t i s f o r a n y f p s o r r a c i n g g a m e.
While many people would likely justify their piracy with the idea that "The people who made it don't receive that money" - that isn't always true, and even then they did get the cash from selling the rights.
It's not as it playing that one specific game is a human right, after all.
It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them, seeing people that are wishing to spend hours on a game, but not to pay the rightholders the equivalent of 5-10 minutes of average SWE salary.
Because it costs $0 to copy the game, all the resource cost is in production; and popularity is an OK motivation for good games but not the best, as evidenced by the prevalence and revenue dominance of microtransaction slop.
No, I think people should just be paid a livable UBI and not have to worry about proving their worth to you to be allowed to live.
The whole copyright system needs a huge overhaul as it is taking away the ability to share what is the art and creation forms of today.
Kagi was founded by Vladimir Prelovac. But it is incorporated in Delaware, and subject to any sanctions the US imposes. It is not a sanctions bypass.
DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader.
I do feel that Wikipedia understates the importance of Windows for Workgroups. Internally, it wasn't just Windows 3.1 with networking. It was a trial run for the fundamentals of the Windows 95 architecture.
When I worked at C_ we used to load Some solitaire game (Freecell) to verify that Windows98SE was in 32-bit mode before installing the network stack, and Chief Legal Officer, and from what I understand CLO was $4,000 a seat.
Load Driver, Reboot, Solitare, CLO. and then onward to disk optimizing, and then virus scanning... Two people did 89 machines, in 4 days. an entire floor... Food was delivered, and we slept for 4 hours, in the floor below, and on Friday, The head of Legal called us into his office... we showed him the checklist, as complete, and He laughed... the whole department was both amazed and happy.
He really called us to change his desktop into a scene from JAWS.
It was Windows 98SE that got a 32-bit disk driver upgrade, and FreeCell verified that it was installed.
In theory, yes. Yet some games could not run in those "DOS VMs" because not enough real memory was available, which means that they weren't real VMs. The real "DOS VMs" appeared in Windows 2000.
edit: I see Vice City has been removed following a DMCA request!
DPMI was pretty much an "Operating System API/ABI".
Windows 3.x running in 386 Enhanced Mode had a very small multi-threaded preemptive kernel, which it used to handle its MS-DOS windows. So whilst each Windows program ran cooperatively within Windows and had no memory protection, Windows itself and each DOS window it opened were pre-emptively multitasked and had better memory protection. This wasn't very well documented, but it's the beginnings of Windows no longer running on top of DOS and instead taking over control of the machine.
Windows 3.1 also introduced "32 Bit Disk Access" which used a custom disk driver to bypass DOS and the BIOS and speed things up. Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups) extended that to "32 Bit File Access", which bypassed DOS for file operations.
Windows 95 only used DOS as a bootstrapper. It would be completely incorrect to say that Windows 95 "ran on top of DOS", as once Windows 95 finished booting it had effectively pulled the rug out from DOS and was handling all I/O, memory operations, and so forth. It would be like saying that Linux runs on top of GRUB - GRUB is no longer in control of the machine, so it's just not true.
Not that I'm saying you were stating Windows 95 ran on top of DOS, you understand! I'm just putting this information here for educational reasons and expanding on your comment. ;-)
Some windows games will run under the hx extender.
I used it quite successfully for an official sequel to an old DOS game a few weeks ago, and it even got to the point where it was pretty trivial to patch the js-dos ZIP bundle on the fly to modify how the original DOS game worked.
You can even get an extremely cool boxed version: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RetroeXo
I keep minimal ExoDOS, MAME and RetroArch installs on my laptop so when I'm reading a retro article about some cool game I've never heard of (or only vaguely remember) it's easy to download the game files and give it a go. Frankly, retro emulation has gotten so incredible lately with upscaling, 4K texture packs, mods, decomps/recomps and fan translations of Japan-only titles - it's been 18 months since I played a game released in the last decade. Currently, I'm halfway through the best late-90s Japanese shmups. Next up I have 126 PS3/X360 titles curated from top ten lists on my backlog.
It is large, but seriously? I do not think it is complete, far from.
Also, it is a riot seeing AoE2 on there; I just finished getting my ass kicked in a 3v3. Got tower dropped and never recovered while my teammates tried to carry.