Play old games in your browser

Hey everyone, this is Sean from VisiHow and today I'm going to show you how to play old games in your browser. Specifically only in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. It is using InternetArchive.org's new massive collection of old DOSBox games. So they're all old computer games that run and stream through your browser through this website, and I'll show you how to do it. It's really simple and it's pretty great. It is in beta, so it does have some problems but they're working on it, and it's pretty impressive.

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   First, I did mention DOSBox, which if you've never used, we can look at that right now

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   That's a program you actually download to your computer and you play games directly through that. It doesn't require streaming or anything like that. It's more like you actually download the games themselves to your computer, and with DOSBox you do it through that. It's kind of complicated. I've used it in the past and it was definitely way more complicated and challenging to use than what Internet Archive has set up. So let's just go straight over there and look at that.

   

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   Let's head on over to Internet Archive

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   It is InternetArchive.org if you want to type it straight in, or you can just Google it or Bing or whatever you want to use. It is a non-profit library that offers access to free books, movies, music, text, audio, software, images - it has over 400 billion webpages and it's huge, massive, crazy... and really cool.

   

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   Now that we're actually on the website, you can see on the top here it's got Web, Text, Video, Audio, Software, and Images

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   We're going to want to click on Software.

   

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   Then it's going to give you a bunch of different options here

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   MS-DOS games is where you want to go. They also have classic PC games and a bunch of other stuff. The classic PC games are mainly demos that you can download, they're not streaming through your browser or anything like that. So let's go to MS-DOS games.

   

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   As you can see here, they have over 2200 games on here right now

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   You have classics like Prince of Persia, Oregon Trail, Dune, Street Fighter, Golden Axe, and tons and tons.

   

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   If you go any one of these pages, you can see comments, favorites, views, information from when it was originally released, what it originally came out for, pretty cool information for you

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   To start any of these games, you go over to the middle here and press "Click to Begin," and it'll start loading

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   On the right you can turn off the sound, go into full-screen, favorite it, share it, any of that

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   As soon as you start the game, it's going to ask you to hide your mouse pointer or get rid of it, and it's either going to change it to one in the game itself, or just switch to normal keys like left, right, space, or enter, or just any controls that are on the keyboard and usually basic things

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    Each game on here kind of varies with how well it works

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    It says on the main page that the browser-based emulation is still in beta, and they're still working on it so some things work really well and really fluid, and the keys work well and it actually makes sense, and then there's other ones that if you try them they might be kind of frustrating. I tried Dune 2 earlier, which is a strategy game, and it barely worked.

    

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    There are certain things that will be too slow or too fast, and they have fixes for that to slow things down or speed things up - you just have to check out the FAQ right here on the main page, which has tons of stuff as you can see

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    There is no saving yet, they don't have that - they're working on it. So that is a big difference between this and other emulators.

    

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    But this whole thing that they have set up is pretty damn impressive and it works fairly well, especially for having over 2000 games on here right now

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    So to end this, if you want to play old games on your browser, straight up, this is one of the best ways to do it through InternetArchive.org. I hope you go check it out. Thanks for checking out this VisiHow video!

    

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If you have problems with any of the steps in this article, please ask a question for more help, or post in the comments section below.

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