Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The folks at the Internet Archive are add it again, further hampering humanity’s attempts at productivity by adding more than classic 2,000 MS-DOS games to a growing software library that already includes Atari 2600, ColecoVision and arcade video games.
According to the Washington Post, over 2,400 classic MS-DOS titles have been added to the Archive’s Software Library, including The Oregon Trail, Castle Wolfenstein, Prince of Persia, Leisure Suit Larry, the Bard’s Tale, the Carmen Sandiego series and many others.
The website allows interested gamers to play instantly directly through their web browsers, KUSA News in Denver explained. However, the curators of the archive note that the programs could have some bugs in them, and they are asking for feedback from the online community.
“I really worked hard to have only fully-functioning programs up, or at least, programs that gave viable, useful feedback,” software curator Jason Scott explained earlier this week in a blog post. “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… But on the whole, you will experience some analogue of the MS-DOS program, in your browser, instantly.”
“Enjoy the games,” he added. “Play a few programs, note how you get around to things, and talk about what works and what doesn’t work for you. There’s a feedback button – use it. The goal is that you will be able to do everything you can do with the old interface with the new, but that you’ll have so much more happening on the new one.”
Scott also said that most of the titles will remain in the archive, while others will eventually be pulled, changed or replaced. He added that the no-plugin-required, play-in-browser interface is unique and that getting things up and running has required a lot of effort – effort that wouldn’t be worth it unless the gaming community tries out the game and offers their feedback.
While PC World calls it “the most consumer-friendly way to use DOSBox so far,” the website also pointed out the elephant in the room: will gaming companies allow the library to stay intact? While some of the MS-DOS titles qualify as abandonware, and are thus in an emulation-related grey area, others are still being marketed by companies that could pursue legal action.
Thus far, 4D Prince of Persia has been the most downloaded title, with more than 81,000 copies having been enjoyed as of early Thursday morning. The original Prince of Persia is second with over 79,000 downloads, followed by Stunts with over 60,000 and Wolfenstein 3D and Lemmings 2 – The Tribes, each of which has been downloaded more than 38,000 times thus far.
“The MS-DOS project is likely to see similar popularity to the console experiment,” the Washington Post said. “Although this isn’t the first time some of these games have made it into a playable browser format, the Internet Archive’s undertaking is an unprecedented work of interactive preservation.”
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