Internet Archive Posted 10,000 Browser-Playable Amiga Titles (techcrunch.com) 83
The folks behind the Internet Archive have added a huge trove of Amiga games and programs to the site, bringing the total to more than 10,000. All these games can be played on your web browser. The non-profit library first began adding Amiga software to its catalog in 2013. TechCrunch adds: We can't vouch for the quality of all of the Amiga titles that were recently posted up on Archive.org, but there sure as heck are a lot of them -- 10,000+, by the site's count, including favorites as Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, King's Quest and Double Dragon, along with what looks to be a fair amount of redundancy. I'm not really sure what the difference is between Deluxe Pac Man v1.1 and Deluxe Pac Man v1.7a, but I suspect it's fairly minor, even for completists.
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Re: Link to best of list (Score:2)
One very early Amiga game had generated / algorithmic music... can't recall the name... Anyone?
algorithmic music (Score:2)
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Thanks, but no. It was a little pixelated character moving over a vast-ish landscape. Had some very basic, but very spacey and moody, procedural background music. I've been trying to think of it on and off ever since I saw this post. Drawing a blank. Sigh. Old.
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No, not that one either.
very early. a1000 time frame.
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No. It was a spacey mood, run-across-a-landscape thing with background music of slowish notes that constantly mutated.
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Thank you! I didn't know there was a version of Tempest with a pair of hands holding the playing field open. Amazing that they could do that with vector graphics.
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Are you referring to Goatse-Tempest?
can somebody explain (Score:3)
Level set: I work as a developer, mostly on the backend with Java and Java-like languages (groovy, scala, etc..), occasionally
Still I wouldn't even know how to start emulating games in the browser.
Re:can somebody explain (Score:4, Informative)
It can't be that much different from emulating the games in some other language or platform. You'd have to emulate the CPU and chipset, collect input from the user (keyboard and mouse at least, and holy shit joysticks too! [html5gamepad.com]), and output the graphics (HTML5 Canvas) and sound (HTML5 audio) to the browser. Given that the MC68000 family of processors and the Amiga chipset have been emulated many times before already, plenty of inspiration exists to get you started.
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In fact this is the very emulator they are using.
SAE [scriptedam...ulator.net] (possibly based off of UAE?)
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Thanks! Very cool. It does say "heavily based on WinUAE" right there on the front page.
Re:can somebody explain (Score:4, Informative)
But web browsers desperately need a better way to run code than turning it into JS - something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS. Chrome did something called PNaCl along those lines but it would have to be adopted across all browsers.
Re:can somebody explain (Score:4, Informative)
something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS
First, there is asm.js, which is a subset of js that runs in almost every browser, which can be easily compiled into assembly. It has been the alternate proposal to PNaCl by mozilla, and has won against the google idea. Its basically the same as PNaCl performance wise, the sole difference is that PNaCl is bytecode while asm.js is in textual representation (and a valid subset of js, so it works even in browsers without direct support for asm.js).
Of course, the textual representation takes up more space than the bytecode, and even though gzip transport compression (which is usually deployed for http connections) gives a similar end product as pnacl, it takes a little overhead computation wise to decompress and in the end its a redundant step. Therefore, the browser vendors (including microsoft, which in fact really liked asm.js, it used it in its office 356 products) are now working on a native binary successor to PNaCl and asm.js which will get a proper standard. Its called web assembly.
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Well asm.js is about 50% more than native [1], maybe slower on browsers that don't have asm.js optimisations (the analogon for PNaCl would result in it not working at all). So yes, its 20% difference, but its not considerably far away, unless you say that PNaCl is far away from native speeds.
Javascript is not designed to model a processor architecture
No it isn't. But asm.js is. The only thing it doesn't have that "normal" assembly has is gotos, its done via manual loops instead.
It uses LLVM bitcode which means it can be translated into native instructions and cached.
Its the same for asm.js, it gets translated into native instructions as well. At least on
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Slight point of clarification, the product Microsoft used it in is Office Online (formerly Office Web Apps), which is their web-based implementation of Office products. They're not as full featured or as supported as their desktop counterparts but they are free.
What they are not, however, is part of Office 365 (or at least not the versions available to the public). Office 365 is Microsoft's term for their s
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Ah sorry, thanks for the clarification.
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But web browsers desperately need a better way to run code than turning it into JS - something like LLVM bitcode that can be compiled and run at near-native speeds instead of the crappy 2-10x slower JS.
All I know is my cutting edge desktop doesn't have the horsepower to run their Kings Quest II. Judging by the roughly 1 frame per 5 seconds, I'd say my machine needs to be about 150 times faster. Maybe I'll try again in 20 years or so?
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Without knowing anything about the particulars of this solution, a likely approach nowadays would be to take an existing emulator [amigaforever.com] writen in C/C++ and compile it to JavaScript using Emscripten [github.io].
Emscripten produces JavaScript compliant with the asm.js profile [asmjs.org], which is a subet of JavaScript that is easily optimized by the browser JS engine, allowing in-browser performance on the order of half of native speed. Given the age of the emulated hardware, this slowdown is not a problem.
You still have to emulate a
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I'd worry more about how to save games between sessions. How can they do that? Without leaving a browser window open forever? These Amiga games...there are a few shoot-em-up arcade style games, but most of them are in-depth experiences that take weeks or months to finish. You need to save your game and come back later.
I think they don't/won't/can't implement this functionality and thus this playable Amiga archive is worthless. BUT someone got to spend months accomplishing something with all the grant
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I'd worry more about how to save games between sessions. How can they do that? Without leaving a browser window open forever? These Amiga games...there are a few shoot-em-up arcade style games, but most of them are in-depth experiences that take weeks or months to finish. You need to save your game and come back later.
I think they don't/won't/can't implement this functionality and thus this playable Amiga archive is worthless.
The dosbox emulator they use does save games. http://ascii.textfiles.com/arc... [textfiles.com]. It might be possible (or is already done!) for SAE
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The javascript emulator would have access to https://www.w3.org/TR/webstora... [w3.org]
How do they do it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Internet Archive has a ton of copyrighted material available. How do they get away with piracy while IP holders go apeshit over "abandonware" and torrent sites?
Cue lawyers in five... four... (Score:3)
Some of the publishers are still in business, or the holding company of those that were acquired are still in business.
I think we can expect their staff bottom feeders to start making threats pretty soon.
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For a few weeks after Archive.org put up their emulations for coin-op arcade ROMs, you could find the whole Donkey Kong series, the Pac-Man series, Defender/Stargate, Pole Position, and a bunch of other top-tier arcade games in there. Shortly thereafter, the lawyers found out about it and cleared out nearly all of the top-tier games and a good swath of the second-tier ones as well. There are still a few gems that survived (Joust, Gorf, Berzerk), but the collection now is a fraction of what it started as.
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>If you look at previous cases against copyright infringement the proof has pretty much been "because we say so" and it goes through because the courts doesn't know jack shit and the company representative is dressed in a suit and the "copyright infringer" have slacks and an attitude.
That pattern seems to be changing though - the recent happy birthday case saw the copyright revoked because WB couldn't prove they ever actually owned it.
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Strictly speaking, 320x200 and 320x256 weren't interlaced. They just refreshed half the scanlines twice as often, while totally ignoring the other half. In modern parlance, they were "200p60" and "256p50".
That's also why a lot of first-generation LCD TVs had problems displaying 320x200 or 320x256 from old computers and videogames. It was technically never an official video mode, and the fact that it worked was just a lucky side-effect of the way CRTs operated.
Nifty trivia: through clever CPU timing, someone
How is this legal? (Score:1)
How is any of this legal? The listed games "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, King's Quest and Double Dragon" are definitely still copyrighted.
Even if you're playing them in a browser from someone else's computer, that seems essentially the same as what Aereo was sued for doing with antenna signals.
what about the kickstart roms? and amaiga os? (Score:2)
what about the kickstart roms? and Amiga os? looks like they are using aros
Heck (Score:2)
I was supposed to be doing things. Now I'm decades old game and having fun.
Mostly junk... (Score:4, Informative)
I played with and also searched for various titles. Mostly it is endless demo scene disks, demo versions of games and many of them don't work properly. The ones that do load play sound erratically, the emulator timing ramps up and down like a record with variable speed playback.
There were some really amazing games on the Amiga, and you're not going to get the sense of what it was like here. No Psygnosis games, and I couldn't get even the Turrican Demo to work properly. Plus no options that I can see for scanline emulation, the line doubling looks pretty bad and doesn't present what it actually looked like on a CRT monitor.
The fascinating thing which is hard to realize now is that when games like "Shadow of the Beast" came out in 1986, the PC / DOS crowd was still largely on 16 color CGA with no sound beyond beeps and clicks unless you bought an expensive add on sound card like a Turtle beach. The Macintosh was just discovering color. We were enjoying arcade quality graphics and sound as far back as the Amiga 1,000 thanks to a set of discreet graphics and sound chips. (Paula, Agnes, Denise etc.) It was heady times and a great time to be an Amiga user, from the mid-80s till the early 90s.
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You had to spend several times the amount of money on IBM PC compatibles, with their cheap performance and costly expansions, to get the same kind of experience the Amiga had out of the box. It wasn't until the release of Windows 95 that the IBM PC had definitely surpassed the Amiga in both software, absolute performance, and performance per price.
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Of course they don't. No modern screen can display its awesome 64Kx64K graphics with one color (black).
Missing some key titles (Score:2)
No Marble Madness and no Clown-o-mania. I'll go back to work now.
Xenon 2 in browser with music! (Score:1)
You stars archive.org
Mech Battle ... (Score:1)
So I found two different versions of the all-time great game, ... mech battle? Mechforce?
A little searching showed that it had two different names over time (fasa lawsuit perhaps?): Mechforce, and Battleforce.
I *really* wanted to play it.
Sadface; two different versions, and neither would work. One did not give any icons inside the disk window; the other gave the icons, but the main game does not launch.
This is the game that could have really redefined mech combat games. It showed just how badly designed the
Late to the party (Score:3, Informative)
Damn.
"After a beta-testing period, the emulated Amiga programs at the Archive have been taken down for further development. Thanks to everyone for testing the Amiga In-Browser emulation package during the beta period, and especially a thank you to the Scripted Amiga Emulator project, as well as db48x and bai, for all the hard work with this experiment."