Still from Wolfenstein 3D
Retro PC gamers can reconnect with some of their old favourites as 2,400 MS-DOS games have been made availabe to play via a web browser.
The project is the latest to be released by The Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation that has thus far emulated hundreds of home computers and other devices via the JavaScript language.
Last year, members of the team released hundreds of classic coin-operated games from the 1970s through to the 1990s and, once again led by Jason Scott, they repeated the trick, making DOS classics such as Wolfenstein 3D, Metal Gear and Championship Manager playable online. Unfortunately though, it’s not possible to save the games you’re playing, meaning it’s going to take a serious commitment to finish Duke Nukem 3D in a single sitting.
“I really worked hard to have only fully functioning programs up, or at least, programs that gave viable, useful feedback,” wrote Scott via his blog.
“Some of them will still fall over and die, and many of them might be weird to play in a browser window, and of course you can’t really save things off for later, and that will limit things, too. But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly.”
Taking to microblogging site Twitter, Scott has promised additional functions will be added at a later date, including networking, printer support and the ability to save files to a desktop.
Down the line, I hope to have interesting things like networking, printer support, and saving a files to your desktop. But not today.
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) January 7, 2015
