I wish there was an instant play button for some of these, the interface is kind of obtuse. I did the Quake 3 port that they used as the base for their Q3A, and I have my own site that lets you instantly drop into a match vs. bots: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/. It's not just the original running in an emulator either, I made it a real web port with support for features you'd expect in a modern web game that the original didn't have. Things like touchscreen and gamepad controls, ultrawide and 240 Hz monitor support, and peer-to-peer internet multiplayer over WebRTC.
Publishing things that are still available for purchase from storefronts (like steam and gog) seems to be stretching the definition of "abandonware".
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.
First thing I did was pull up Sim City 3000 (I have so many hours of play time on this that never got recorded anywhere) to see if the simulation speed goes nutso like I remember on my old Windows ME MS-DOS Compaq back in the day. Every time I played the game on any XP or newer PC I get speed limited in Cheetah mode and it feels like it takes _forever_ for my city to develop. Not even installing WindowsME on an emulator would fix it because it was some scheduler fix at the NT kernel level or something, idr.
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.
Apparently this site is by the same person who created js-dos [1], which is an absolutely fantastic emulator for running and hosting DOS games in the browser.
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.
Well, DirectX was win95 and later right? Windows Enhanced mode and future is kind of both on top of and underneath dos. There's a kind of wild layering that happens.
Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI.
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.
In other words, they were bare-metal hypervisors which passed through the majority of the hardware, doing a minimum of virtualisation to allow sharing it between VMs. This is easy to see by comparing the responsiveness of a DOS box running something like EDIT in Win9x vs. NT/2K/XP's NTVDM; the latter is a full emulator of basically all the hardware except the CPU.
The unresponsive NTDVM was mainly due to its piss-poor text mode emulation. Win9x still virtualized the graphics card (so you couldn't use SVGA games in Win9x) but its emulation was implemented better.
This is exactly why I come to HN, vs Wikishemedia... People here WERE THERE!
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.
Hell yea! My mom wouldn't me play the Duke Nukem 3D game CD that game with my joystick because it was too violent and otherwise objectionable. I can finally see what it's about!
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.
I wish iPadOS properly handled full screen and keyboard input. It runs rather well on my M4 iPad Pro but the lack of proper full screen support in the browser with mouse capture ruins it. Awesome emulator though!
I’ll give a different opinion that it’s really heavyweight to install exodos locally just to get a nostalgia hit when there’s plenty of sites like the above where it’s one click to run an old game fullscreen in a browser window.
True, but when I installed ExoDOS I choose the option where it just downloads the descriptions, tagged metadata and a few screenshots per game with a searchable menu system. You can browse by name, genre, publisher, resolution etc, pick the game you want and it gets only the necessary files from the torrent (which, given the era, are very small). It's quick and seamless.
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.
I also have an instant-run port of Cave Story: https://thelongestyard.link/cave-story/. Porting classic games to the web is a fun hobby!
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.
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.
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.
[1] - https://github.com/caiiiycuk/js-dos
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861204
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086249
https://steamcommunity.com/app/358430