Hacker News

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Oh yes, Quake 3 Arena, classic DOS game.

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.

i love russians' nonchalance for anything regarding copyright

Oh dang, goodbye productivity for the next decade.

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

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

this website been around for a really long time though.

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.

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

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!

Wow there goes 45' replaying Dune 2! Thanks.

that was great

My games! My youth. Most of them are here. Feels good .

What's with the slop cover art for Doom?

so cool!

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