Play Ultima 6, Savage Empire, and Other Origin Systems Classics In Your Browser Now
BY
WTF DRAGON · JANUARY 6, 2015
I can only assume, by now, that many of you have heard about the Internet Archive’s
massive library of MS-DOS games, some 2,400 titles in all that can all be played
right there in your browser thanks to a DOSBox port called
EM-DOSBox (which uses
Emscripten to compile C++ to JavaScript). The game library is itself a wondrous thing to walk through…so many great (and not-so-great) titles of yesterdecade (and earlier!) are archived therein, and many happy memories attend them.
A number of
Origin Systems games can be found in the collection, including
Ultima 6 (evidently the full version), various
Wing Commander titles (some apparently the full version, some evidently just demo versions),
Knights of Legend,
Windwalker (which I gather some of you are rather fond of),
Crusader: No Remorse, and a demo version of
Ultima 7.
And at least one
Ultima fan project —
Untima IX: Descension — has also been included in the library, which fact I find rather amusing. (Kudos to Manuel Masias for spotting that one.) I was even surprised to see
NOMAD in the collection (it’s not an Origin game, but I rather enjoyed playing it back in my teenage years).
There may be other Origin games hidden away in the library; I found the ones I could, but there seems to be some inconsistency in terms of how creatorship of games is attributed: some games have “Origin Systems, Inc.” listed as their creator, whereas others have “Origin Systems” listed as their publisher. Very confusing, this.
As well, it should be noted that, because this is a web-based DOSBox instance these games are being played in, some (most? all?) of the games don’t allow the use of their save feature. This is certainly true of
Ultima 6, as noted above. So, be mindful of that before diving in; you may not be able to resume your progress after closing the browser tab.
