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DOS_deck offers free, all-timer DOS games in a browser, with controller support
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 27 November, 2023 - 19:50 · 1 minute
Enlarge / DOS_deck is an impressive technical feat, sure. But it's also a very keen curation of some DOS shareware classics (pun somewhat intended). (credit: DOS_deck/Martin Kool)
Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody's idea of fun.
DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom , Jazz Jackrabbit , Command & Conquer , and Syndicate , with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you're using to read this post.
In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple levels of Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I've taken another punctuation break to play the first level of Syndicate , which moves much faster than I remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to and move around, and there's a host of little extras to appreciate, including constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain games as favorites.
