Internet Archive can emulate games and old software.
Internet Archive can emulate games and old software.
!textfiles@mastodon.archive.org - A silly milestone we passed sometime this year: The Internet Archive now emulates (to various degrees, of course), over 250,000 pieces of software, hardware, and electronics, thanks to the effort of a dozen emulation projects and all of them running in the browser. Live again, ancient software!
Headline is wrong. Internet archive has been emulating software for a long time now.
Maybe they just got to 250k titles, but them emulating is not new.
yea. it already had more than 2000 MS DOS games back in 2015
Damn, that's fucking awesome. How long until they start receiving DMCAs from AiPlex or Nintendo?
(AiPlex is an Indian anti-piracy company who's becoming known for spamming DMCAs and extorting content creators for even the slightest IP violations (sometimes striking reviews which contain no infringing content whatsoever or spamming DMCAs on irrelevant videos to force content creators to cave to their demands). They do it claiming to represent companies who have previously not given a shit.)
Internet Archive's been victim to anti-preservation efforts for years. They'll deal with them likely the same way they always do, and are dealing with a lawsuit right now over The Great 78 Project.
They have had some game emulation for years. I remember playing Oregon Trail on Archive.
Love the Internet Archive. They're my second favorite place to get ROMs, and it's specially important now that most ROM sites are borderline useless with most links removed.
First place goes to one specific FTP server that contains a clean copy of every single possible ROM, for every system imaginable, with high speed downloads and the correct file extensions. I have copies of their IP address in multiple places, hell, I might tattoo it, I'll die with this number imprinted on my brain my fear of losing it is so high.
Just a few days ago, I was looking for an obscure copy of an old CD called "Walnut Creek Game Patches CDROM" - I found references to this inside an old DOS game cheats program, so I got curious and wanted to check it out - and was pleasantly surprised to find it on the Internet Archive.
You can find most of the CDROM game patches and special patches at old-games.ru as well. This is a website as organised as Vimm's Lair.
Vimm's lair is awesome for roms. Its downloads are slow, but the website is organized and no spammy ads.
Agree.
I got a huge file of arcade ROMs there...but many of them are MAME broken so ymmv.
ETA: FTP?!?! Ppl still FTP?
This is amazing! I haven't opened up After Dark since I was a child!!! Thank you! I'm going to have to look through this for more nostalgia deep dives.
I just want to play fisher price castle and Wild West games. How can this be done? I have the isos for those games.
PCem. I took that same nostalgia trip a year or two ago and they worked fine.