<
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/11/dos_deck-offers-free-all-timer-dos-games-in-a-browser-with-controller-support/>
"Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can
be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a
playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu
screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within
an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody's idea of fun.
DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing
classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like
Doom,
Jazz Jackrabbit,
Command
& Conquer, and
Syndicate, with reconfigured controller support and a
simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it
in a browser, right now, the one you're using to read this post.
In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple
levels of
Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I've taken another punctuation
break to play the first level of
Syndicate, which moves much faster than I
remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to
and move around, and there's a host of little extras to appreciate, including
constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain
games as favorites.
Martin Kool, creator of DOS_deck, fully credits his creation's lineage on the
About page, specifically the DOSBox emulator and the JS-DOS project that got
DOSBox working in a browser. DOS_deck's coders have put "a tremendous effort"
into developing controller schemes for their games, Kool writes. From the
half-dozen I poked around, I can confirm. I would never have expected to get
far at all in the original
Warcraft or
Syndicate with a controller, but
it's doable. Keyboard shortcuts are still valuable—and you can use a keyboard,
of course—but a controller works fine for this kind of throwback enjoyment."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
