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My biggest criticism of Exodos is that while it is _from_ the original media, it is not the original media itself. They modify games for easy launching, often throwing away the installation files and other setup stuff.
I prefer the philosophy of “TDC”, the Total DOS Collection, which in most cases is simply the original install media in a zip file.
> I prefer the philosophy of “TDC”, the Total DOS Collection, which in most cases is simply the original install media in a zip file.
Even better is to image the disks and provide a FAT file system image for each floppy disk.
Even better is to create a kryoflux image, as that is not only disk format agnostic, but pretty much the most faithful digital preservation method we have right now.
The Kryoflux company claims ownership of all images created with Kryoflux hardware.
To quote Internet Archive's Jason Scott, "I wouldn't use a Kryoflux to pry open my last can of beans."
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/ti...
IA's Archive Team have guidance for anyone wanting to archive floppy disks:
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...
and optical discs:
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_optical...
Unfortunately copyright law doesn’t even remotely recognize that claim.
> Striving to find original media rather than using scene rips.
Wow, this is a weird point of pride. So, you’re making a new scene rip? Better to just give everyone an image of original media along with some patches if you want.
Yeah that's something I noticed. No matter the claims of being from original media, that's the only thing I think is worthy of distribution.
Is TDC still around?
Yes on The Internet Archive.
I actually gasped when I spotted a game I made in the 90s in there (text adventure). Then I gasped again when I noticed how big that archive is...
I always felt the "Golden Age" of DOS games was 90-95, this archive at least mostly agrees with that feeling, which is interesting to me:
The outliers are interesting to me too:
Adventureland (1978)
Beneath Apple Manor (1978)
Pirate Adventure (1978)
Mission Impossible (1979)
Dungeons of Noudar 3D (2018)
Encroaching Gloom, The (2018)
MagiDuck (2018)
Planet X3 (2018)
Sigil (2019)
I've heard of a couple of 'em.
Might be a good moment to pass on this coming rebuild of X-Wing, XWVM[0], that's in the offing. It uses the original game files and audio but is built on a modern 3D engine.
[0]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqWo9FNiidE
It's missing "Pickle Wars"!
Is there a reason this needs to exist, as opposed to the massive collections already congealing at The Internet Archive? Is there some deficiency in those collections that makes this superior?
The ROMs on Archive.org are largely pulled from eXo's collection anyway. The main value that eXo's collection adds is the custom DosBox tuning for each individual title. The Archive.org JS-based runner doesn't come close, most titles there barely run at all, let alone with hand-tuned configurations and metadata.
Quite the extensive collection... hundreds of zipped game files.
I've been searching for years to find an early multiplayer DOS lan game (~1990) that I believe was called 'Trek'. You separately controlled multiple ships to protect your base and attack others. It was basic ascii graphics but my friends & co-workers spent hours playing via local lan setup.
Hoping it's in this collection!
Oh, if we're doing one of these threads, my white whale is a mid-80's CGA DOS game where you set off in search of a lost ... uncle? and have to solve puzzles and avoid hazards.
There are two parts I remember very clearly. The first is that you have the choice when you leave the house at the beginning of either bringing along a walking stick or something else, and if you don't choose the stick, there's a part on an outdoor trail where you twist your ankle and lose the game.
The other part I remember is getting shrunk somehow and ending up in a drawer full of drinking straws. You have to work your way through this tube maze, but some of the straws are clear (invisible) and if you wander into one accidentally, the game lets you know it was so narrow that you get stuck in it forever, lose the game, and die.
I’ll point folks over to
https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmyjoystick/
(Like “tip of my tongue,” but for games.) Just a solid community helping people find long-lost games.
Might as well mention a game I remember playing but can never find.
It was a brown-ish DOS platformer, I remember it was distributed (to me) as "mario" even though it was not a Mario clone. Probably EGA graphics? The most similar one I've seen is one of the Dangerous Dave games, but I don't think it was that! It's not "Monuments of Mars" either.
Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it, or maybe it was a small project someone made and never properly released.
edit - "Rick Dangerous" looks similar too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNEgrJ9wejo
On the slim chance anybody remembers: I've been fascinated back then by a game I've only seen in magazines. It was some kind of war simulator with a greenish vector graphics map of the north Atlantic. I think you could coordinate everything from that view and give very detailed orders. Must be well before 2000.
You can try the game browser at MobyGames. A game that may help you decide which filters to use is Harpoon. Harpoon was black and white on the Macintosh and colour on other platforms, so it's probably not the game in question. Greenish vector graphics implies that it is a game from the 1980's.
(For reference:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/harpoon
)
Oh. I think it might have been Harpoon II. The screenshot at
https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/harpoon-ii/screenshots/ga...
looks like it might be what I remembered. I'll have a look. Thanks a lot!
Edit: I'm now sure that's it. I even found a scan of the original gaming magazine (the German "PC Player") with the test I read back then.
Trek (1985)?
https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/trek
http://exodos.the-eye.us/public/eXoDOS/Games/Trek%20%281985%...
Hot damn... yup!! Thank you.
Such a great game for its time. Edit: it's modem <-> modem not LAN so a max of 2 human players. So I assume we were using null modems to play together in the same room.
Seems likely that this Carlton McLawhorn [i] from Wendell NC is the author (and also an avid rocketeer and scoutmaster).
[i]
https://stricklandfuneral.com/carlton-carl-bruce-mclawhorn/
Is this a dos version of the much older mainframe game?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)
Slightly inspired by it maybe, but verry different (real-time vs turn based is biggest difference).
oh, I remember playing EGA Trek.
There was an old Japanese game I found on a BBS. It was a side scrolling (left to right I think) shooter (like Raptor, but left/right) and the graphics felt very anime. I think it was VGA/DOS. There's no way I can possibly look it up because it was entirely in Japanese. I have no idea what it could have been called. I don't remember the name of the ZIP file either.
Rangerfox?
Edit:
Oh I now see that it had an English release. The version I had was Japanese or Korean and was tricky to navigate the menus.
Still it was fairly animeish and had a cool soundtrack from what I remember
oh wow. Yep, that's it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HI5xyDJxpM
Kind of crazy to think in the thousands of man hours involved in old software products. These products generated millions (billions?) of dollars and impacted the life of so many people, only to be available for free now, only just a few decades ... isn't this kind of thing unique of the software craft?
Public libraries have been a thing since the 1800's, which are equally amazing in terms of bringing tremendous impact to millions of people who wouldn't have otherwise had that benefit.
The key different of course is that mid-80's DOS software is more-or-less obsolete and abandoned for a reason (the computer history community notwithstanding, of which I'm a part), whereas public libraries are filled with books that still retain almost as much value as they day they were written.
Sort of off topic, but I recall a DOS game my dad played that was kind of like a Roguelike but with rudimentary top-down graphics, where you explored a castle. Anyone know what it is?
The Castle of the Winds, maybe? It was a fairly popular shareware title
Technically that game was Win 3.1, not DOS (although Win 3.1 ran on top of DOS, so...). Still a very fun game and my first exposure to RPGs.
Hmm, I almost want to say zzt but it is not procedurally generated or used sprites.
Nahklah was a favorite of mine, but it is not procedurally generated either.
Next weeks goal is to setup ao486 on my MiSTER and see how well these remind me of my first computer (486 66dx2)
What's the purpose of the _!DOSmetadata.zip_ and _XODOSMetadata.zip_ files taking up 18 GB each?
XODOSMetadata is all the images (box art, disc art, screenshots) and manuals associated with a game, so the launcher has all the assets necessary to provide its interface. !DOSMetadata is dosbox configurations and .bat files for running games.
It could be much smaller and stream those dynamically, but the creator is more focused on the archival and preservation than optimizing the download size.
Or just splitting it up per game so you don't need to download 36 GB to play 1 game.
I tried a couple donwloaded from the site and worked just fine on DosBox without those dirs.
A DOSBox emulator question...
If I run a DOS MZ executable infected with a virus that attempts to flash my BIOS, will that affect the host computer?
No:
- A program running inside DOSBox sees the DOSBox BIOS, not the host computer's BIOS
- Even the host computer's BIOS was visible, the host computer's OS is responsible for preventing random programs (including DOSBox) from poking directly at hardware
- I'm pretty sure DOS viruses generally predate flashable BIOS, and even if there was a DOS virus that tried to flash your BIOS, it wouldn't know what to do with a modern UEFI setup
Are you talking about CIH? Anyways it could damage your system on dosbox as dosbox has your files mounted a drive so it could wipe that. Virtual machines are the best way to go. Either way it will not affect the BIOS as most boards are UEFI
But CIH infects PE executables not MZ executables right?
Oh, didn't see that. You're correct
How large is the download?
~500GB
Only off by 8.5 GB, which is a whole dual-layer DVD...
Awesome project, definitely going to grab the file.
Did anyone else think of Ultima 3 when they went to their page?
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61%2Bvy7oGO...
Kind of cool to know the bits are from the OG media.
How is this legal? Sincere question, since all (nearly all? perhaps a couple have been put into public domain) of these games are protected by copyright. And yes, it is hurting the copyright holder in many cases, because many of the titles are still sold through distribution sites like GOG.com. Some of these games are not even that old (<20 years).
They have a DMCA page, but their philosophy seems to be "put it all out there and wait for the DMCA notices." Disingenuous at best since they must know ahead of time that they are violating a lot of IP. It's one thing to be against our global IP laws. It's another thing to flagrantly disregard them. You can be against something without violating it.
How does archive.org get around this with their software collection?
There is an exception in the DMCA for abandonware [1] [2], and anything DMCAd (legitimately) will be darked (remove from public availability, but still stored) until abandonware again.
This seems more fair than having to obtain specific clearance for every work that may fall under copyright (Project Gutenberg has had to tolerate doing this for decades [3]).
> You can be against something without violating it.
Off topic: Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws. Copyright law has become too draconian and infringes on the public good, therefore some don’t respect it. This doesn’t mean content creators shouldn’t get paid.
Disclaimer: No affiliation with the Internet Archive. Words and thoughts are my own.
[1]
https://toucharcade.com/2015/10/29/new-dmca-exemption-takes-...
[2]
https://copyright.gov/1201/2015/fedreg-publicinspectionFR.pd...
[3]
> Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws.
It's worth noting that in the United States, a lot of civil disobedience that has happened, and is happening now, is built on legal reasoning that the unjust laws in question are also unconstitutional, since our constitution explicitly grants many rights to US citizens.
This also affords a way to commit civil disobedience in good conscience for those whose religion or personal convictions forbid disobedience to civil authority.
> There is an exception in the DMCA for abandonware
Those sources indicate the DMCA exemption is only for single player games requiring online activation where the server is no longer available. That is probably a tiny subset of "abandoned" DOS games.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673076
From a comment about two years ago:
“I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but looking at the Wikipedia page for the DMCA [0] there appears to be protection for retro games:
An exemption was made for 'Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.'
EDIT: Actually archive.org posted an article about exactly this [1]”
See the link for citations. My understanding is that there are a combination of factors that coincide to provide a safe harbor for the Internet Archive to serve this content.
> There is an exception in the DMCA for abandonware
My point is that several of these titles are not abandonware since they are still being sold by original publishers on GOG.com
> Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws. Copyright law has become too draconian and infringes on the public good, therefore some don’t respect it. This doesn’t mean content creators shouldn’t get paid.
Big difference between civil disobedience being justified by laws restricting fundamental rights (e.g. voting rights) and civil disobedience because you want to play an old game. Extreme measures (e.g. breaking laws) should be reserved for big injustices IMHO.
> My point is that several of these titles are not abandonware since they are still being sold by original publishers on GOG.com
As a platform, you aren't required to proactively investigate the copyright status of works uploaded to your platform by the general public. If you leave it up until you get a DMCA takedown request, and promptly remove it if and when the DMCA takedown request arrives, then the DMCA safe-harbor provisions apply.
Any of these original publishers can legally serve a DMCA notice on the Internet Archive, and the Internet Archive will I'm sure promptly respond by removing public access to the material (they will keep it archived so they can restore public access when one day the copyright expires, or if the copyright owners have a future change of heart before then). The fact that those publishers haven't means that either they don't care about what the Internet Archive is doing to their copyrighted works, or possibly even some of them tacitly approve of it.
I believe archive.org is also an official library as a legal entity, which grants them additional rights and protections.
It is not unheard of for a commercial entity to reason – "X may be technically illegal, but it is unlikely anyone will complain, and even if they do, if we just stop as soon as we get a formal complaint it is unlikely they'll sue us, and even if they do, the fact we stopped as soon as they complained about it will work in our favour legally".
If commercial entities reason like that, and quite often (even if not always) get away with reasoning like that, what is wrong with a not-for-profit entity doing the same? If anything, the fact that its motivations are philanthropic rather than commercial makes it engaging in that kind of reasoning even more defensible.