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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Resurrecting DOS – Bringing Classic Gaming to the Web

Hi There, We’ve all felt the nostalgia for classic DOS games like DOOM, Prince of Persia, and Duke Nukem. Unfortunately, running these games on modern systems is a hassle with often 10+ setup steps. To bridge that gap, I’ve built a platform that leverages DOSBox and JS-DOS to bring these beloved titles directly to the browser. Say goodbye to complex setups! This platform seamlessly emulates DOS games, letting you jump straight into the action. I'm eager for your feedback on emulation performance, game compatibility, and user interface. I’m currently beta testing and plan to integrate a light…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Resurrecting DOS – Bringing Classic Gaming to the Web launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    WePlayDOS▲205

    Play classic DOS games in browser

    2024 · weplaydos.games · its alternatives →

  3. 3IR

    After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…

    2025 · jdfio.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4D1

    I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file. I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method. It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and…

    2025 · doompdf.pages.dev · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    💾 Virtual Reality DOS . Contribute to sonictruth/vr-dos development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    I'm a Unity 3D refugee, certified expert, started in 2005 when it was a two man-band with Joachim and David. I've been lucky enough to make a good living out of Unity with my own consultancy over the years making data visualisation applications (Wind Energy) and innovation projects (Visualising accounting data for Wolters Kluwer etc.). Godot is pretty amazing in my opinion. Wrote this game over a few days and was productive in Godot basically instantly. I couldn't get up and running in Unreal despite trying a few times. It's my ambition to start a niche agency developing 80's style games of…

    2023 · lfgslots.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7IM

    Hi, As a 8-bit C64 game coder in eaarly 90ties and currently mostly FE-focused dev, decided to give a go to a simple retro game archive. This is purely fun project - so i decided to post it to HN, mayne it'll resonate :)

    2023 · polishpixels.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8AR

    My background project for the last two years has been re-implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL, and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!) Play the game online: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more powerful, the web…

    2024 · nicollet.net · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    RetroTick parses PE/NE/MZ binaries, emulates an x86 CPU, and stubs enough Win32/Win16/DOS APIs to run classics like FreeCell, Minesweeper, Solitaire and QBasic, entirely in the browser. Built with Preact + Vite + TypeScript. Demo: https://retrotick.com GitHub: https://github.com/lqs/retrotick

    Feb 2026 · retrotick.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Extracted Maps of the DOS Game Test Drive 3. Contribute to s-macke/Test-Drive-3-Maps development by creating an account on GitHub.

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN, I’ve been working on Gore – a port of the classic Doom engine written in pure Go, based on a ccgo C-to-Go translation of Doom Generic. It loads original WAD files, uses a software renderer (no SDL or CGO, or Go dependencies outside the standard library). Still has a bit of unsafe code that I'm trying to get rid of, and various other caveats. In the examples is a terminal-based renderer, which is entertaining, even though it's very hard to play with terminal-style input/output. The goal is a clean, cross-platform, Go-native take on the Doom engine – fun to hack on, easy to read,…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Boxer▲84

    The DOS game emulator that’s fit for your Mac

    2015 · boxerapp.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5uygzEmdLw Hi HN, I built a RISC-V emulator that implements the RV32IM instruction set and a minimal syscall interface to run DOOM. A few weeks ago, I got my first output with a simple hello world assembly program. Since then I have been working tirelessly to get DOOM to run. I needed to figure out how to run C programs first, and came across newlib, which allows the underlying environment to implement the syscall stubs one by one until the programs run. I have also added ELF loading, but currently only a single `PT_LOAD` segment is…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A retro gaming subscription service for PC

    2016 · gamepump.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…

    2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Bit Pit▲74

    Score-hoarding arcade jumparound

    2015 · voishark.itch.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN, When browsers killed NPAPI plugin support, thousands of early 2000s web games were effectively lost to time. Macromedia Shockwave, in particular, was a closed-source, highly complex, and largely undocumented beast. So a few friends and I spent the last two years doing something arguably unhinged: rebuilding the entire Director engine from scratch. Today, we're finally sharing dirplayer-rs. Repo: https://github.com/igorlira/dirplayer-rs We intentionally stayed quiet on this until we had undeniable proof that it was actually possible. With our latest v0.4.1 release,…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    An RPG with random generated elements.

    2015 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Tired of the hassle of setting up classic NES, SNES, Sega, Arcade, and Atari games on modern systems? I have built something way simpler - browser based emulation. Key Features: Instant Play: No downloads or complex configurations required. Extensive Library: Explore iconic titles like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, and Street Fighter II. Seamless Emulation: Enjoy smooth gameplay powered by advanced browser technology. Cloud Saves: Never lose your progress again with cloud saving. Let me know your thoughts/suggestions and help bring back the glory…

    2024 · weplayretro.games · its alternatives →

  21. 21EA

    Hey HN, Endless Adventure is a DOS-style text adventure game that lets you explore any story you can imagine. It should feel like it came from an alternate universe where we developed LLMs in the 80s. No login needed so you should just stop reading this and go play with it yourself! I’ve poured a lot of love into both the UI and the storytelling engine that powers it. Everything looks simple, but behind the scenes there is a lot of work to keep context, move the story forward, and maintain state for things that are never explicitly exposed (e.g. inventory, karma, quests, NPCs, etc). I…

    2025 · endlessadventure.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A final project for Advanced Machine Learning. Build bots to play against this Tetris Sandbox! - mbrenman/TetrisPlayground

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    It's been about 3 weeks since I dusted off the Multiplayer Tetris game that me and a buddy wrote A year ago and that's been collecting dust since then. A lot of after work and weekend hours have been pooring into the project since then, and I think it's about time to show the progress What's been done: - Preloading - Completely rewrote layout for desktop / tablet browsers using css3 :target. - Usage instructions added (one of the comments I got: "Yeah, it works, but how do I play?" ) - Sending all powerups to other users now works (click on another user's playfield to send powerup) - Game…

    2012 · goo.gl · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    About a year ago me and a buddy joined Google's HTML5GameJam, a game building hackathon. Finally I've had the time to dust the project off, upgrade some of the required libraries (node.js bumped from 0.4.2 to 0.8.11 in the meantime) and did some minor patching to get it done for some finishing touches and hopefully release somewhere this year. We implemented the full real Tetris® (yeah, that means T-Spins and funky stuff Tetris addicts like) in MVC, with configurable renderers (canvas, ASCII, Divs), input methods (keyboard, swipe, touch), 2player split mode and offline singeplayer. The…

    2012 · en.wikipedia.org · its alternatives →

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