I’m sure many of you have visited the Internet Archive at one point or another, or taken advantage of the massive library of free music, books, or film. In fact, many of you are probably aware of the Archive’s Arcade Emulation section, allowing to you to play many arcade games from years of yore. But we’re not interested in yorish arcade games right now. We’re after a different species of nostalgia: MS-DOS games. If you’re an old fogey like me, you’ll likely have misspent much of your youth playing games in CGA and EGA, and longing for a VGA. Or listening to the blips on PC speaker and wishing for a SoundBlaster for christmas. Or, hell, tapping away happily on your 8086 connected to a 20MB hard drive and a 360kb floppy drive, and hearing about the wonders of the 286 and the 720kb “stiffy” drive. Ahh….memories…
In any event, it was with much glee that I was pointed at the Archive.org’s insanely exhaustive repository of MS-DOS games, available to be streamed in your browser to you (like Gauntlet in the image above). No mucking about with DOSBox or fiddling settings; it’s all ready to play. And for someone like me, it’s pure nostalgic gloriousness. Oh, and a word to the uninitiated: most MS-DOS games are far far harder than the pansy stuff you kids play today.
I’m not sure how long this particular archive has been active, but I’ve had to tear myself away from it long enough to write a post about it—after this, you’re on your own again until I’ve sated my nostalgia-gland.
Check it out: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games