[markus_zhang]

I'd really love to see a similar approach but applied to games much older, like the ones you have to pull out a DOSBOX to play, or a Win95 virtual machine. The Win95 games are going to be much more difficult to set up because the VM needs a bunch of stuffs to work properly (sound, video) while the DOSBOX does everything for you.

[mbrukman]

Blog post author here.

Yes, I'm planning to do this for much older games in the future, and you're also right that DOSBox does a lot of that for you!

One thing I've noticed is websites that let you play using old DOS games via DOSBox right from your browser (e.g., see https://www.dosgames.com/), so I was going to make a blog post for how to do that yourself, from scratch.

Would that be of interest?

[markus_zhang]

Yeah that definitely is interesting! Thank you~~

BTW is there some way to perform save/load functionality without log-in? Maybe we can use cookies to identify users? Just a thought as I'm not a programmer...

[mbrukman]

Note that I'm not the owner/developer of that site, so I can only guess how it's implemented there. However, I can give you a general overview for why logins are typically required for such use cases.

While you're correct that cookies is a good way to identify users, they could be faked by other users (to steal or change your saved games), which is why websites typically have user accounts where you have to prove you know something (such as a password) in order to claim to be user id 12345.

If you don't have to prove anything to claim to be user 12345, then some creative users on the internet will write bots that will claim to be every possible user (in sequence), and either trash or delete their saved games, or do something else to affect them in the future.

Thus, we have the need for user accounts on websites to securely identify users and their settings, saved games, shopping carts, purchase history, etc.

If you're interested in learning more, take a look at:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

* https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Hope this helps!

[Groxx]

Though I realize it's not the same thing, as a dos-game-fan have you seen https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games ?

[mschuster91]

If I were to guess, I'd try to run qemu-kvm with exposed VNC... a "builder" intermediate that installs w95 as a base image, with a second dockerfile using that as base and installs the game in the virtual disk using overlay images.

That should be decently fast, the only thing I dunno is how easy it is to automate a w95 install when you only have an 1:1 iso image of a retail setup CD/diskette.

[rabidrat]

I did a project back in 2013 that made unikernels for really old games. One was a bare-metal z-machine interpreter to instantly bootup interactive fiction game. Another was a Linux+C64 emulator+modded game (one of the first graphical adventure games, Below The Root, from 1984).

http://arcade.saul.pw/games/