We’re pitting our skills against old school gaming again
Ihad an urge the other day to see if I could get through Alone in the Dark without resorting to any kind of cheats or walkthroughs. As it happens, the most difficult part of the process was actually finding a working copy of Alone in the Dark to play.
My virtual DOS setup hasn’t been behaving in recent months, for some reason or another, so when I came to load up AitD, it kept crashing out at the intro. After trying repeatedly to copy the image of the game from the virtual machine to somewhere I could open it in DOSBox, I finally gave up and settled for something a little more modern.
However, what I should have done is to open up PlayDOSGamesOnline.com and play it via my browser.
C:\
As the name suggests, this is a site that’s dedicated to bringing you thousands of abandonware DOS games through the browser and using DOSBox.
While there are lots of other sites, including the Internet Archive, PlayDOSGamesOnline seems to get the right mix of settings needed to be able to play the game properly – at least on the few dozen we’ve been playing over the weekend.
As you would expect, getting to a game and running it is easy. All you need to do is find the game you want, either from the genre links along the top of the main page of the site or with the search box. When you’ve found your favourite DOS game, click on the link and either click in the DOSBox screen or press the spacebar to begin.
You’ll find most games have instructions below the play area, along with any special requirements, keys needed and even some handy hints and tips or a complete walkthrough. The hardest part is finding which of the many games you’d want to play.
While it’s always fun to have an emulated system, in the form of a virtual machine or a locally installed DOSBox or even a real 486 DX2-66 with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 installed, there’s an extra level of convenience to PlayDOSGamesOnline and other sites like it. Granted, it’s not the same, and there’s always a chance that the sound will drop out or fail completely, but for a quick ten minutes or to relive the anxious moments of hunting down an alien in UFO: Enemy Unknown, PlayDOSGamesOnline works a treat.
Moreover, you can get to sample those games you missed out on the first time around or locate that elusive title that you once played the demo of, as found on a magazine cover.
Big Games
One thing worth mentioning is that some of bigger games, such as Myst, require a decent internet connection to enjoy properly. Myst itself has a big 470MB file to download and run, among a few other files, and it runs from within Windows 3.11 too, so you’ll need to have a semigood PC.
Another issue is the bottleneck that is the browser. While Chrome does a good enough job, you’ll need to make sure you’re running the 64-bit version, because it solves a lot of memory problems with DOSBox. Firefox seems to be better. Then again, Firefox does end up taking over 1.2GB of memory when running Myst, so be prepared for a possible problem with other programs.
Enjoy
The biggest draw to PlayDOSGamesOnline is the fact that no matter how poor the old games appear next to the newer ones, they’re great fun and part of our history.