Play the games again

Nothing dates a decade like its games. The arcade cabinet you fed quarters to, the cartridge you blew into, the shareware episode that came on a floppy from a magazine cover — nearly all of it now runs inside a browser tab, emulated in JavaScript and WebAssembly, at the same frame rate it ran at then.

The libraries below fall into two camps. The Internet Archive collections are preservation projects: enormous, unfiltered, catalogued by hardware, and legally cleared for in-browser access as part of its software library. The rest are curated front ends — smaller catalogues, faster to load, easier to browse when you already know the name of the thing you are looking for.

One practical note before you start: emulated games expect a keyboard. Arcade titles map fire to Ctrl or the spacebar, and DOS games often want you to click into the canvas once before they take input at all. On a phone, look for a title with on-screen controls, or come back on a machine with real keys.

The list

PastPlaypastplay.org Our site Our own library: over 25,000 console and arcade titles across NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Atari and more, each on its own page with the emulator loaded in the page. Sorted by machine, by letter and by year. Internet Arcadearchive.org The Internet Archive's wall of coin-op cabinets, emulated with MAME. Roughly 2,000 machines from the late 1970s through the mid-90s, including the ones nobody has seen since the arcade closed. Console Living Roomarchive.org The home-console half of the same archive: Atari 2600 and 5200, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Odyssey², Astrocade. This is where the pre-crash era lives. MS-DOS Gamesarchive.org Thousands of DOS titles running through an in-browser DOSBox. Shareware episodes, edutainment, the games that shipped with a sound-card driver disk — searchable by year and by keyword. Classic PC Gamesarchive.org A hand-picked shelf pulled out of the bigger DOS collection: the titles that were actually good, rather than the titles that merely survived. ClassicReloadclassicreload.com A curated catalogue of DOS, Amiga, Apple II and console games with saved-state support, organised the way a games site is organised rather than the way an archive is. RetroGames.czretrogames.cz NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy and Master System in the browser, with a genuinely good search. Fast, plain, and it remembers your controls. PlayDOSGamesplaydosgames.com A tidy DOS catalogue with screenshots and short write-ups — the easiest place to browse if you want to be reminded what a game looked like before you commit to loading it. MyAbandonwaremyabandonware.com A download archive rather than a player: full old PC releases with manuals, box scans and install notes. Many entries also have a play-in-browser button. js-dosjs-dos.com The DOSBox-to-WebAssembly library that most of the sites above are built on. Useful if you want to put a DOS game on your own page rather than play someone else's.

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