!textfiles@mastodon.archive.org - A silly milestone we passed sometime this year: The Internet Archive now emulates (to various degrees, of course), over 250,000 pieces of software, hardware, and electronics, thanks to the effort of a dozen emulation projects and all of them running in the browser. Live again, ancient software!
Headline is wrong. Internet archive has been emulating software for a long time now.
Maybe they just got to 250k titles, but them emulating is not new.
yea. it already had more than 2000 MS DOS games back in 2015
Damn, that’s fucking awesome. How long until they start receiving DMCAs from AiPlex or Nintendo?
(AiPlex is an Indian anti-piracy company who’s becoming known for spamming DMCAs and extorting content creators for even the slightest IP violations (sometimes striking reviews which contain no infringing content whatsoever or spamming DMCAs on irrelevant videos to force content creators to cave to their demands). They do it claiming to represent companies who have previously not given a shit.)
Internet Archive’s been victim to anti-preservation efforts for years. They’ll deal with them likely the same way they always do, and are dealing with a lawsuit right now over The Great 78 Project.
They have had some game emulation for years. I remember playing Oregon Trail on Archive.
Love the Internet Archive. They’re my second favorite place to get ROMs, and it’s specially important now that most ROM sites are borderline useless with most links removed.
First place goes to one specific FTP server that contains a clean copy of every single possible ROM, for every system imaginable, with high speed downloads and the correct file extensions. I have copies of their IP address in multiple places, hell, I might tattoo it, I’ll die with this number imprinted on my brain my fear of losing it is so high.
Just a few days ago, I was looking for an obscure copy of an old CD called “Walnut Creek Game Patches CDROM” - I found references to this inside an old DOS game cheats program, so I got curious and wanted to check it out - and was pleasantly surprised to find it on the Internet Archive.
Vimm’s lair is awesome for roms. Its downloads are slow, but the website is organized and no spammy ads.
Vimm is great for most retro systems, but when you get into the disc-based era, the proprietary or alternative formats are pretty bad. For Wii, you download a weird stripped down ISO format that requires a random piece of software to restore into an usable format, for instance.
This is amazing! I haven’t opened up After Dark since I was a child!!! Thank you! I’m going to have to look through this for more nostalgia deep dives.