Another of the things I pulled off of my old floppy disks (“Making floppy disk images under OS X”, 2019-07-26) was a game called “Dragonflight” which I wrote in Turbo Pascal, dateline September 1999. These days we’d call it a Flappy Bird clone. There’s no win condition; you just flap along until your health drops to zero or you get bored. Hit F1 (or alternatively, ';') to bring up the help screen.

The ASCII art is credited to “Gunnar Z.” and “Unknown.” You can still find Gunnar Z.’s little dragon sprite in various places online, such as here. I believe the “Unknown” refers to the dragon on the title screen, which I vaguely recall might have been lifted from some anonymous Dragonriders of Pern fan art.

Running DosBox in the browser

Actually, the main point of this blog post is not to show off “Dragonflight”; it’s to keep me from forgetting the magic formula for running DosBox in the browser! This is the same kind of modern magic that lets you play Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom over at the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive apparently uses em-dosbox; but I’ve found that js-dos is much easier to set up, at least if your “build machine” is not a Linux box, because js-dos comes pre-built.

To set up js-dos, you just place its three JS files (js-dos.js, wdosbox.js, wdosbox.wasm.js) together somewhere; and then make a tiny index.html that loads js-dos with a .zip file containing the files you want on your DosBox’s virtual disk plus instructions telling DosBox what command it should run when the virtual machine starts up. And that’s all! The only downside is that wdosbox.wasm.js is a hefty 2.3MB in size. Fortunately, that’s a one-time cost; you can have many .html/.zip pairs all sharing the same .js machinery.

Nifty!