The huge, San Francisco-based non-profit digital library The Internet Archive has made over 2,300 classic MS-DOS games available to play in-browser using the browser-based emulator EM-DOSBOX. The games include favorites that anyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s will remember -- Lemmings, Scorched Earth, Prince of Persia, Sim City, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, and many, many more. All genres are included: action, strategy, RPG, adventure, simulator, etc.
The curators do however, want you to know that the whole thing is still in beta, so there might or might not be some issues. Many games do not have instructions (which would have appeared in a separate booklet), so you often have to figure out the controls and gameplay yourself, if you don't rememebr. It's also not possible to save your game in the browser-based emulator, which for some games might be a deal-breaker. In any event, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and you can expect some serious nostalgia.
How do they get around that whole copyright thing, you might ask? Well, the Internet Archive was able to obtain an indefinite exemption from the US Digital Milennium Copyright Act. According to the terms of use, "Access to the Archive’s Collections is provided at no cost to you and is granted for scholarship and research purposes only", so make sure you studiously get your family to Oregon before they all die of dysentery. This is also why you can't download the software -- the exemption is given "for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive."
So go over there and check it out -- here's the link. If you lose your job, at least you'l have the satisfaction of beating Wolfestein 3D for the first time in twenty years.
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Thanks for the info and link! I remember dying in Prince of Persia. A lot. Never did finish it.