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.
Well, DirectX was win95 and later right? Windows Enhanced mode and future is kind of both on top of and underneath dos. There's a kind of wild layering that happens.
Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI.
DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader.
I do feel that Wikipedia understates the importance of Windows for Workgroups. Internally, it wasn't just Windows 3.1 with networking. It was a trial run for the fundamentals of the Windows 95 architecture.
In other words, they were bare-metal hypervisors which passed through the majority of the hardware, doing a minimum of virtualisation to allow sharing it between VMs. This is easy to see by comparing the responsiveness of a DOS box running something like EDIT in Win9x vs. NT/2K/XP's NTVDM; the latter is a full emulator of basically all the hardware except the CPU.
The unresponsive NTDVM was mainly due to its piss-poor text mode emulation. Win9x still virtualized the graphics card (so you couldn't use SVGA games in Win9x) but its emulation was implemented better.
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.
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!
I’ll give a different opinion that it’s really heavyweight to install exodos locally just to get a nostalgia hit when there’s plenty of sites like the above where it’s one click to run an old game fullscreen in a browser window.
True, but when I installed ExoDOS I choose the option where it just downloads the descriptions, tagged metadata and a few screenshots per game with a searchable menu system. You can browse by name, publisher, resolution etc, pick the game you want and it gets only the necessary files from the torrent (which, given the era, are very small). It's quick and seamless.
I keep minimal ExoDOS, MAME and RetroArch installs on my laptop so when I'm reading a retro article about some cool game I've never heard of (or only vaguely remember) it's easy to give it a go. Frankly, retro emulation has gotten so incredible lately with upscaling, 4K texture packs, mods, decomps/recomps and fan translations of Japan-only titles - it's been 18 months since I played a game released in the last decade. Currently, I'm halfway through the best late-90s Japanese shmups. Next up I have 126 PS3/X360 titles curated from top ten lists on my backlog.
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.
Found this looking for a Sim City 2000 port :)
What the...? Those aren't DOS games, there are plenty Windows DirectX-based games in this site.
Fun fact: earlier Windows OSes ran on top of DOS.
Well, DirectX was win95 and later right? Windows Enhanced mode and future is kind of both on top of and underneath dos. There's a kind of wild layering that happens.
Fun fact, Win 95, 98 and ME booted DOS and autoexec'd win for you.
Yes, but like Windows for Workgroups before them, they didn't need to rely on DOS services once they had started. They were 32-bit multitasking OSes that could host multiple DOS VMs and (in the case of WfW) a 16-bit cooperatively multitasked GUI.
DOS basically acted as a bootloader. But all of those OSes had the very weird feature that they could switch back into a virtualised copy of their bootloader.
I do feel that Wikipedia understates the importance of Windows for Workgroups. Internally, it wasn't just Windows 3.1 with networking. It was a trial run for the fundamentals of the Windows 95 architecture.
In other words, they were bare-metal hypervisors which passed through the majority of the hardware, doing a minimum of virtualisation to allow sharing it between VMs. This is easy to see by comparing the responsiveness of a DOS box running something like EDIT in Win9x vs. NT/2K/XP's NTVDM; the latter is a full emulator of basically all the hardware except the CPU.
The unresponsive NTDVM was mainly due to its piss-poor text mode emulation. Win9x still virtualized the graphics card (so you couldn't use SVGA games in Win9x) but its emulation was implemented better.
There was WinG (aka DirectX 1) that worked in Win 3.11 with Win32s.
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
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!
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
I’ll give a different opinion that it’s really heavyweight to install exodos locally just to get a nostalgia hit when there’s plenty of sites like the above where it’s one click to run an old game fullscreen in a browser window.
True, but when I installed ExoDOS I choose the option where it just downloads the descriptions, tagged metadata and a few screenshots per game with a searchable menu system. You can browse by name, publisher, resolution etc, pick the game you want and it gets only the necessary files from the torrent (which, given the era, are very small). It's quick and seamless.
I keep minimal ExoDOS, MAME and RetroArch installs on my laptop so when I'm reading a retro article about some cool game I've never heard of (or only vaguely remember) it's easy to give it a go. Frankly, retro emulation has gotten so incredible lately with upscaling, 4K texture packs, mods, decomps/recomps and fan translations of Japan-only titles - it's been 18 months since I played a game released in the last decade. Currently, I'm halfway through the best late-90s Japanese shmups. Next up I have 126 PS3/X360 titles curated from top ten lists on my backlog.
Oh dang, goodbye productivity for the next decade.
Pinball space cadet! Many fond memories of it on the family PC.
Not exactly DOS but give Balls of Steel a try [0]
https://steamcommunity.com/app/358430
Don't miss related HN threads from the original authors:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861204
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086249
What's with the slop cover art for Doom?
so cool!