Dos Games Preservation Project
Hello everyone,
Over the last couple of weeks there has been a bit of discussion on the best way to preserve and play some of our favorite Dos games. Solutions have ranged from finding a way to make Dosbox and other Dos emulators accessible to actually running MS Dos in a virtual machine with varying degrees of success. While all of those solutions have some merit I don't feel they truly address the problem of preserving those games and applications for the majority of VI gamers, because they are problematic at best and are not simple solutions to the problem.
Ideally a solution wouldn't involve installing and configuring lots of extra software like emulators or virtual machines. I feel pretty confident in saying the average VI gamer would just rather install and play it no extra dependencies required. Therefore if we are going to truly preserve these games for the average user we need to look elsewhere other than emulators and virtual machines. What I mean b y that is by getting together a handful of interested developers to rewrite most of these games for modern platforms.
It isn't as complicated or as much of an undertaking as it sounds. A lot of these games we are talking about are text only and as long as a developer intends to rewrite it as a text based game he or she can rapidly rewrite the game since they aren't worried about all the extra overhead that would go into an audio game or a video game. By and large text applications and games are pretty simple, and don't take a great deal of time to create. Especially, if they use the right tools and languages for the job.
Back in the 80's and 90's when a lot of these text games were written they would have been written in C or C++. That is fine, but there are simpler solutions now. One such solution is Python which is a high-level scripting language well suited to quick and dirty text applications and games such as we are discussing. I can see an interested developer rewriting some of these Dos games in Python, compiling them, and releasing them in a fairly short amount of time barring other commitments of course.
I feel rewriting these games is the best of all possibilities because it resolves all the problems with playing the originals. First, since the games will be rewritten from scratch they will be compiled for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems thus negating the requirement for a 16-bit environment to run them. Second, they can be released as open source so that future generations of gamers can take the source make new builds if and when needed. Third, they can be redesigned and ported to multiple platforms meaning that instead of just being strictly a Windows game they can be compiled and run on Mac, Linux, etc. Finally, they are games that a blind and a sighted gamer can truly play together. While there will always be disparities between a blind and sighted gamer playing a video game or an audio game they wou ld be equal in playing text based games. So I see this as being a distinct advantage of having a common user interface like text.
In any case I happen to have some free time coming up, and I was wondering if anyone is interested in this project. If so what Dos games would be foremost on your wish list and why?
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