The Internet Archive has added 2500+ playable MS-DOS games today, becoming the biggest update yet for the collection of retro titles. With today’s massive collection of titles added, the number of preserved retro games goes over 7000.
For Internet Archive, “this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.” A few of the recently added titles to the collection include: Ys II Special, Alien Assault, The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr. Doom’s Revenge, Alone in the Dark, and others.
To achieve this goal of addition various titles, the eXoDOS project made this collection of MS-DOS games work on more modern systems.
Activist Jason Scott said: “What makes the collection more than just a pile of old, now-playable games, is how it has to take head-on the problems of software preservation and history. Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps. DOS has remained consistent in some ways over the last (nearly) 40 years, but a lot has changed under the hood and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup. They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories.”
Also, one particular problem for Scott has been the browser-based emulation of games that were originally released on CDs. To play such demanding titles, users’ browsers would have to use about 700 megabytes per CD.
“This is going to be an enormous lean on the vast majority of Internet users out there – downloading multi-hundred-megabyte files into memory and then keeping them there, and then losing it all when the browser window closes. Network speeds will improve over time, but this is probably the biggest show-stopper of them all for many folks,” said Scott.
[Source]: Internet Archive: 2,500 More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Archive.
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