- #ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE UPDATE#
- #ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE MANUAL#
- #ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE ARCHIVE#
- #ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE SOFTWARE#
If you find yourself loading up one of these games and facing down a hundred-megabyte download, consider one of the smaller games instead, unless it’s a title you really, really want to try out.
Network speeds will improve over time, but this is probably the biggest show-stopper of them all for many folks. This is going to be an enormous lean on the vast majority of Internet users out there – downloading multi-hundred-megabyte files into memory and then keeping them there, and then losing it all when the browser window closes.
Depending on the tricks used, you got full-motion video (FMV), the playing of CD audio tracks for background music, and levels and variation of content for the games far beyond what floppy disks could ever hope.īut it was also a very large amount of data (up to 700 megabytes per CD) and it’s one thing to have the data sitting on a plastic disc in a local machine, and yet another to have a network connection pull the entire contents of the CD-ROM into memory and hold it there as a virtual file resources. But the most obvious and pressing is that games based off CD-ROMs take a significant, huge amount of time to load.ĬD-ROMs were a boon to the early-to-late 1990s, allowing games to have audio and video like never before. Some of these have solutions that aren’t always great ( Buy faster hardware!) and in some cases the problem is currently terminal (these programs have been taken offline for a future date). For example, keyboard collision, where the input needs of the emulator are taken over by the browser itself, and the problems of a program needing a lot more horsepower to run in a browser emulator than a user’s system can handle.
#ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE ARCHIVE#
Putting these games into the Internet Archive has, over time, brought into sharp focus particular issues with browser-based emulation. 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). You can always mail me at with questions or technical concerns. The issues that are introduced by this are mine and mine alone, and eXoDOS is not able to help with them. 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. As a result, the eXoDOS project has over 7,000 titles they’ve made work dependably and consistently.
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.
They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories. 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.
#ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE MANUAL#
Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps.
#ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE SOFTWARE#
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.
#ONLINE TEXT ADVENTURE GAME DATABASE UPDATE#
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.
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