Internet Archive Adds over 2000 Free MS-DOS Games to Play

Published: January 12, 2015 9:15 AM /

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archive

Internet Archive is a site dedicated to, well, archiving the internet. They describe themselves as "...a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format." They have to date archived over 435 billion webpages, as well as Audio, Software, Moving Images, and now, Vidya Games!

they have just added over 2000 different MS-DOS videogame titles free to play on your internet browser. These includes games such as MegaMan, Street Fighter, Aladdin, and many more! Although many of these games are of similar quality to the origionals, many look like shoddy CD-i games, so I guess you get the bad with the good in this case. For example:

Streetfighter msdos

Internet Archive seems to be able to run games from web browsers by using a MS-DOS emulator called the EM-DOSBOX. However, this emulator is still in its beta form and may be a bit buggy, and there is also no way as of yet to save your game, so unless you beat any game in one go-round, then oh well.

I did try out a few of the titles, including Megaman, Alladin, and Prince of Persia, and in all three of them I kept running into issues with simple controls. They do allow you to use a controller in order to play many of the games, but a lot of the time the controller does not work, and they don't tell you what controls are what, you have you have to kinda guess what buttons or keys do what, which makes this a pretty annoying setup. They do have some better titles, like Street fighter II, which works pretty well if you can figure out the keyboard controls, but is also a bit laggy, so there is that. No Zelda titles as of yet though.

Anywho, you should look it up, there are plenty of games to choose from, most popular game so far is Oregon Trail, at half a million views. What do you think about archiving MS-DOS games? Are you excited to play some of these games In-browser?

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Lucy
| Former Staff Writer

Lucy Walcott is a former TechRaptor writer who loves to talk about gaming. She has been an avid gamer since she was little, focusing almost exclusively on… More about Lucy