2 500 jeux MS-DOS de retour sur Internet Archive

Le site Internet Archive annonce l’arrivée dans ses rayonnages virtuels d’un peu plus de 2 500 anciens jeux issus de l’époque lointaine désormais du MS-Dos. L’occasion de retrouver facilement de nombreux titres des années 90 disparus désormais de nos écrans, et éventuellement de les découvrir ou réessayer via un émulateur. Tels par exemple Zeppelin – Giants of the Sky, War College, The – Universal Military Simulator 3, USS John Young 2, Pacific Islands, The Great War: 1914-1918, Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Wolf, The Pure Wargame, ou encore Wargame Construction Set II – TANKS!, pour ne citer que quelques exemples.

La liste complète se consulte directement depuis cette page. Voyez également l’extrait de l’annonce suivante pour quelques précisions, l’annonce intégrale se trouvant par ici sur le blog officiel.

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2,500 More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Archive

Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we’ve added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.

To browse the latest collection, hit this link and look around.

The usual caveats apply: Sometimes the emulations are slower than they should be, especially on older machines. Not all games are enjoyable to play. And of course, we are linking manuals where we can but not every game has a manual.

If you’ve been enjoying our “emulation in the browser” system over the years, then this is more of that. If you’re new to it or want to hear more about all this, keep reading.

A Recognition of Hard Work, and A Breathtaking View

The update of these MS-DOS games comes from a project called eXoDOS, which has expanded over the years in the realm of collecting DOS games for easy playability on modern systems to tracking down and capturing, as best as can be done, the full context of DOS games – from the earliest simple games in the first couple years of the IBM PC to recently created independent productions that still work in the MS-DOS environment.

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.

It is all these extra steps, under the hood, of acquisition and configuration, that represents the hardest work by the eXoDOS project, and I recognize that long-time and Herculean effort. As a result, the eXoDOS project has over 7,000 titles they’ve made work dependably and consistently.

Separately from the eXoDOS project, I’ve been putting a percentage of these games into the Emularity system on the Internet Archive for research, entertainment and quick online access to the programs. The issues that are introduced by this are mine and mine alone, and eXoDOS is not able to help with them. You can always mail me at jscott@archive.org with questions or technical concerns.

This should be all that needs to be said, but since the Archive is doing things a little strangely, there’s a lot to keep in mind before you really dive in (or to realize, when you come back with questions).

Thanks so much for coming along on this emulation journey!

Jason Scott, Internet Archive Software Curator

  • Jeu(x) / éditeur(s)
  • SSI
  1. Accessoirement et si vous cherchez un émulateur spécifiquement orienté jeux vidéo prenant par exemple en charge l’émulation d’une bonne vieille Vectrex (Ah, Minestorm… !), d’un Amstrad CPC ou d’une multitude d’autres plate-formes diverses et variées, allez jeter un coup d’œil du côté de la dernière version de Recalbox : https://www.recalbox.com/

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