lachu5: I'm currently porting 7kaa to emscripten. I decided to port DOSBOX to emscripten in next step, but there's many port of DOSBOX to emscripten actually.
I have two ideas:
1. Allow to rent collection of DOS Games.
2. Allow to play them via network, using emscripten version of DOSBOX.
What do you think about my two ideas?
There are several sites that offers dos games through the web browser, and most of these hangs in sort of a grey area.
So my question is; which dos games are you thinking of renting out?
Most early dos games are now considered abondonware - although some might still have a tie to an IP/company, which may or may not go after you if you haven't sorted out the licenses for those games. They might not like that you profits from those games. (I'm sure you already know this, but someone else who's reading this might not.)
And even with or without the right - why would anyone rent when they could just buy them AND own them (some that is). Or even get them for free elsewhere. The biggest problem with renting like steam etc, is that if that service goes down, so does the ability to play that game.
My answer to nr 1; I don't think there's any marked for that, but the second one is actually a good idea. Too bad very few dos games supports multiplayer/networking natively, even fewer through certain hacks or ports.