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DOS Zone(dos.zone)
193 points by rglover 8 hours ago | 37 comments
modeless 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wish there was an instant play button for some of the multiplayer games, the server browser 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 demo 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 features you'd expect in a modern web game that the original didn't have. Things like mobile touchscreen and gamepad controls, ultrawide monitor support, and peer-to-peer internet multiplayer over WebRTC.

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.

ecliptik an hour ago | parent [-]

Semi-related, since SDL added support for DOS a few weeks ago I've worked with Claude to port Cave Story to DOS [1].

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.

1. https://codeberg.org/ecliptik/doskutsu

po1nt 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

I admire your work, but at the same time I have to ask: Why?

xerox13ster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

sailfast 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Need For Speed worked just fine for me, FWIW. Macbook Pro, a couple years old using Firefox.

rglover 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Found this looking for a Sim City 2000 port :)

kimixa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

bobim an hour ago | parent | next [-]

True, but in defense of the author site and from a personal perspective, the copyright laws are very skewed and allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once. Even heirs benefit from it for life. Isn't that wildly unfair for all the other jobs where you are paid for your work once for all? And irrespectively from the fact that what you designed has been produced by the million and still running...

ktallett 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Gog and Steam often release versions years later, sometimes items are well abandoned for a decade plus with no interest in release and people fairly download to play. If you then decide to monetize that, I don't think morally you can really blame those who downloaded it and shared it when it was abandoned.

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.

vunderba 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

[1] - https://github.com/caiiiycuk/js-dos

HeavyStorm 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What the...? Those aren't DOS games, there are plenty Windows DirectX-based games in this site.

hungryhobbit 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fun fact: earlier Windows OSes ran on top of DOS.

selcuka 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's still not correct to call them DOS games as you can't run them on DOS.

toast0 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

CodeWriter23 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fun fact, Win 95, 98 and ME booted DOS and autoexec'd win for you.

masfuerte 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

userbinator 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

cyberax 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

ForOldHack 3 hours ago | parent [-]

See? Pepperage Farm and cyberax remembers! Exactly.

ForOldHack 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

cyberax 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There was WinG (aka DirectX 1) that worked in Win 3.11 with Win32s.

antisol an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, when I first opened the page, there were 0 DOS games visible.

pauldjohns 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What happened? Where did the day go? I guess the good news is the world has fewer demons and Raiden is no longer a threat.

andrew_kwak an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tried it out for a bit. Brings back memories of playing those classic games on old computers. Does it support multiplayer for any of the titl

pablonhess 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh dang, goodbye productivity for the next decade.

the__alchemist 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

tjpnz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all outta gum.

klipklop 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

lorecore 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For those unfamiliar with it, I highly recommend eXoDOS, it's literally every DOS game ever: https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html

You can even get an extremely cool boxed version: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RetroeXo

AnotherGoodName 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

mrandish 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

wxw 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pinball space cadet! Many fond memories of it on the family PC.

wgjordan 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't miss related HN threads from the original authors:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861204

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086249

mycall 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not exactly DOS but give Balls of Steel a try [0]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/358430

eapriv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Looks like AI slop in (some of) the thumbnail images. Why would anyone do that?

SpaceNoodled 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's with the slop cover art for Doom?

vldszn 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

so cool!