Probably you've already seen this , but I haven't found a thread about this:

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

Hope this will not decline GOG to publish dos games.

you been ninja'd already hal
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/internet_archive_makes_thousands_of_dos_games_free_including_master_of_orion

I'm pretty confident that my ninja skills are superior. :P

Hail to the NecroLord!

There is such a thing as good necro. Reminding me of this section of archive.org qualifies ;)

That's old. No pun intended.

Another reminder i need to finish my de-tokenizer...

What does a "de-tokenizer" do?

I've messed around some more with the archived games, and I'll just say this: the emulation they're using is not good. There's slowdown, glitching, some things just not working, etc. The extremely simplistic stuff still works like a charm, but there's a lot of mouse driven items that start to suffer the longer you play them.

I don't think anyone has to worry about it harming GOG's business at ALL.

It's really cool to actually see the source from the "tokenized" result. What would be even more cool, is to do something like a "peephole optimizer" for the tokens based on certain patterns of tokens and see if your de-tokenizer would end up writing source code that is either more cryptic or more elegant.

If it's relying on browser as the emulator (via a x86 emulated using Javascript) then OF COURSE It's going to be crappy emulation.

I know of a better place to get older games that include dosbox or another emulation layer if needed that runs much better :) Even got one that lets me run the music through a midi device from Raptor through a good set of soundfonts (which sounded AWESOME!!!)

Do you know what they're using for their emulator? I've heard that they've actually been able to do some really cool things with Emscripten to convert C/C++ to asm.js. (Basically an optimized subset of JavaScript.)

If they have a "home-grown" JavaScript emulator, I can see it having shortcomings --however, as an entry into the archives in general, it's a really cool way to at least show people who were never familiar with the game how it looked and played --not necessarily turn it into an online gaming arcade.
Actually, you should take a look at asm.js and Emscripten --they've done some really creative ports of applications to JavaScript that actually run fairly well on modern hardware.

Just to be thorough: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Porting-Examples-and-Demos

I actually have the LST files which are the source code, which i used to do a raw compare against the output in these to ensure the detokenized results were correct... I also loaded up the BAS files, treated them as cassette tapes and just CLOAD-ed them up which let me check stuff i wasn't sure if the output was right or not... (Which was awesome!! :) )

As for optimizers, yes that could easily be done, but it would probably be heavily based on 1:1 input, a known set of better code... Although it's far more likely that converting it to 6502 code would have a much better result...

Reminds me.. I wrote a quick little BASIC program to draw a circle since the graphics modes were simple and didn't require anything special to get going... And honestly floating point work (Especially SIN/COS/TAN) is SLLLOOOWWWW!, the largest speedups involved saving the results or re-using the SIN/COS results rather than re-calculating them. So a peep-hole optimizer might be useful, but better coding is going to get a much better result...



Reminds me... Later i'm considering disassembling the entire BASIC rom and figuring out how it all works, perhaps make a presentation for it...
Not to mention more recent versions of Firefox have pushed more a JIT recompiler for Javascript to make it run faster... Or was that written with D? I forget...

Hmmm, one of first things I saw was on this site was this. Sometimes I surprise myself by my ability to find strange stuff where others are just passing by...