Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Running decade-old games in containers

misha.brukman.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#51

Post by markus_zhang »

mbrukman wrote: post #22
markus_zhang wrote: post #2

I'd really love to see a similar approach but applied to games much older, like the ones you have to pull out a DOSBOX to play, or a Win95 virtual machine. The Win95 games are going to be much more difficult to set up because the VM needs a bunch of stuffs to work properly (sound, video) while the DOSBOX does everything for you.

Blog post author here. Yes, I'm planning to do this for much older games in the future, and you're also right that DOSBox does a lot of that for you! One thing I've noticed is websites that let you play using old DOS games via DOSBox right from your browser (e.g., see https://www.dosgames.com/ ), so I was going to make a blog post for how to do that yourself, from scratch. Would that be of interest?

Yeah that definitely is interesting! Thank you~~

BTW is there some way to perform save/load functionality without log-in? Maybe we can use cookies to identify users? Just a thought as I'm not a programmer...

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#52

Post by mbrukman »

tuco86 wrote: post #46
rmdashrfstar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog post time!

Always wanted a blog. I have no blog.

Blog post author here.

It's easy to get a blog going with either GitHub or GitLab plus their "Pages" hosting environment, or Netlify.

Here's how you can do this with just GitHub Pages or GitLab Pages:

* https://pages.github.com/

* https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/pages/

Here's how I originally hosted my blog with Gitlab Pages using Hugo (a static site generator):

https://misha.brukman.net/blog/2019/05/building-a-site-with-...

and then ended up migrating to Netlify when I upgraded Hugo to a new version to support a different theme (Netlify has additional benefits, like automatic live previews):

https://misha.brukman.net/blog/2019/05/switching-hugo-theme/

And here's someone else's 1-hour walk-through of the same workflow:

https://brainfood.xyz/post/20190518-host-your-own-blog-in-1-...

It's pretty straight-forward process regardless of which approach you take. I hope this helps you get started with your own blog!

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#53

Post by butz »

dllthomas wrote: post #9

I've been trying to get Obsidian ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(1997_video_game) ) to run under emulation, but so far it's been too choppy to be playable.

Had some luck with Windows version of Obsidian. Using Ubuntu 20.04, should work on other distributions too.

1. Install wine and timidity. I presume xephyr server is installed.

2. Insert CD and run setup.exe with wine. Install game to default location, install QuickTime when it asks.

3. In one terminal window run timidity midi server (if you want background music): `$ timidity -iA -B128,8 -Os`

4. In another terminal window start the game like this: `$ Xephyr :1 -ac -screen 640x480x16 & DISPLAY=:1 wine "C:\\Program Files\\Segasoft\\Obsidian\\Obsidian.exe"`

In case you don't have physical optical drive you can use CDEmu to mount disk images, but it has to be installed from additional repository and has a bit of complicated setup.

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#54

Post by mbrukman »

readwind wrote: post #49
mbrukman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your email is nowhere to be found, so it's impossible to email you about typos or bugs. Typos in this case. You're right, I don't post my email address on my blog, and yet it's widely available and discoverable (which leads to spam, so...). That said, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and send me a private message there. Public comments on HN also work. :-) Back to your original point: > Anyways search for:…

:) glad to be of help. Keep on producing great things.

Just wanted to let you know that I fixed this (and a few other issues I found upon re-reading my post for the Nth time).

Thanks again for your help!

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#55

Post by mbrukman »

markus_zhang wrote: post #51
mbrukman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog post author here. Yes, I'm planning to do this for much older games in the future, and you're also right that DOSBox does a lot of that for you! One thing I've noticed is websites that let you play using old DOS games via DOSBox right from your browser (e.g., see https://www.dosgames.com/ ), so I was going to make a blog post for how to do that yourself, from scratch. Would that be of interest?

Yeah that definitely is interesting! Thank you~~ BTW is there some way to perform save/load functionality without log-in? Maybe we can use cookies to identify users? Just a thought as I'm not a programmer...

Note that I'm not the owner/developer of that site, so I can only guess how it's implemented there. However, I can give you a general overview for why logins are typically required for such use cases.

While you're correct that cookies is a good way to identify users, they could be faked by other users (to steal or change your saved games), which is why websites typically have user accounts where you have to prove you know something (such as a password) in order to claim to be user id 12345.

If you don't have to prove anything to claim to be user 12345, then some creative users on the internet will write bots that will claim to be every possible user (in sequence), and either trash or delete their saved games, or do something else to affect them in the future.

Thus, we have the need for user accounts on websites to securely identify users and their settings, saved games, shopping carts, purchase history, etc.

If you're interested in learning more, take a look at:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

* https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Hope this helps!

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#56

Post by dllthomas »

matthewn wrote: post #19
dllthomas wrote: post #9

I've been trying to get Obsidian ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(1997_video_game) ) to run under emulation, but so far it's been too choppy to be playable.

I'm glad someone else remembers this forgotten gem. Every couple of years or so, I try to get Obsidian running again. No luck so far. :(

My email's on my profile. Shoot me an email and I'll let you know if/when I ever get it working well.

Re: Running decade-old games in containers

#57

Post by rmdashrfstar »

tuco86 wrote: post #46
rmdashrfstar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog post time!

Always wanted a blog. I have no blog.

I will periodically be reminded about this comment, with the intention that one day, when I check, you will have replied with a URL to your blog.

No pressure, I’m just looking forward to it.

Post reply on HN