Games

3,920 games from 8 systems, running in the browser through the Internet Archive's emulator. Pick a system, pick a decade, or type a name. There is nothing to install, no account, and no download: the emulator and the game both come from archive.org and run inside the frame below.

What is on each system

MS-DOS (500, DOSBox). The deepest shelf here and the one most people mean by old PC games: the era of the 5.25-inch floppy, the config.sys tuned by hand and the sound card that had to be told its own IRQ.

Arcade (500, MAME). Coin-op boards run under MAME. These are the original cabinet ROMs rather than home ports, which is why the screens are the odd shapes they are and why some of them still want you to press a key for coin and then another for start.

Commodore 64 (500, VICE). The best-selling single computer model ever made, and a library to match. Loading is emulated faithfully enough that some titles still take a moment on a blue screen before anything happens.

ZX Spectrum (500, JSSpeccy). British bedroom-coder output from 1982 onwards, written for a machine with 48K and a rubber keyboard. The colour clash is not an emulation fault, it is what the hardware did.

Amiga (500, SAE). The machine that sat between the 8-bit micros and the PC, with hardware sprites and four-channel sound years before the PC had either. Expect longer loads: these are floppy images being read by an emulated drive.

Apple II (500, MAME apple2ee). Educational software and early adventure games from the machine that put computers in American classrooms. A lot of this exists in playable form only because a small number of people spent years removing the copy protection.

Windows 3.x (500, DOSBox). Games for the desktop that arrived before gaming did: card games, puzzle games and shareware written to run in a window next to a spreadsheet.

Game Gear (420, MAME gamegear). Sega's colour handheld, the one that ate six AA batteries in four hours. The smallest library here and the only console in it.

These games are not public domain, and we are not going to say they are

Every item on our Retro TV pages is out of copyright, and that page shows the two tests each one had to pass to get there. It would be easy to paste the same paragraph here and hope nobody checked. It would also be false, so here is what is actually true about this section instead.

The first test does not survive the software library. Of the 76,826 Archive items that are software, carry a working emulator and state a publication year between 1971 and 1999, only 755 carry any licence information at all, and 619 of those claim public domain. That is eight items in every thousand.

The second problem is that those 619 are not public domain either. Sorted by popularity the list opens with a 1992 Super Nintendo racing game, the 1994 sequel to Doom, a Spanish-language copy of Windows 95, the second Prince of Persia and an unreleased Sonic prototype. Not one of those was released by its owner. Somebody ticked a box on an upload form, which is the same failure that got an entire television advertising collection cut from Retro TV, except that here it is at the top of the list rather than buried in it.

On Retro TV a publication date rescues the situation, because age really does put film into the public domain: anything published in the United States before 1931 is out of copyright outright, and most of what followed until 1977 lapsed through a failure to renew. There is no equivalent move available here. Commercial games start in the early 1970s. Nothing in this catalogue is old enough to have aged out of copyright, and nothing published in the next twenty years will be either. A year test applied honestly to games returns an empty page.

What the basis actually is

The Internet Archive is a library, and it runs its software collection as one: it preserves the disk images, it maintains the emulators that run them, and it publishes an embed address so the result can be opened anywhere. Its position is that preserving software and providing access to it is library work. That position is the Archive's own, it has been argued over, and we are in no position to settle it here. What we can tell you is exactly what this site does and does not do with it.

Watream stores a title, a year and an Archive identifier. That is the whole of it. Pressing play loads archive.org inside a frame on this page; the disk image, the emulator and the save state all live on the Archive's servers and are served by the Archive to your browser, exactly as they would be if you opened the item there yourself. We do not host, copy, mirror, proxy, re-encode or cache a single byte of any game, and every item on this page carries a link back to the Archive page it came from so you can check that for yourself.

If you hold rights in something listed here, there are two separate things you can do and they have different effects. Writing to us through the copyright page removes the title from this index, which takes a line in a data file. Removing the game itself is a matter for the Internet Archive, because the Archive is what is holding and serving it. We will point you at the right place and we will not argue about it.

How the emulator behaves

These are not remakes or browser ports. They are the original programs, running on a machine reconstructed in software: DOSBox, MAME, VICE and others, compiled to run inside the browser. That fidelity is the point, and it is also why some of it feels strange. Loading from an emulated floppy or cassette takes as long as it took in 1987, because the emulator is pretending to be the drive as well as the computer.

A few practical things. Nothing starts by itself; press the power button on the screen. The game only gets your keystrokes after you click inside the frame, so if the page is scrolling when you press the arrow keys, click the game first. On arcade machines the controls are the cabinet's, which usually means 5 to put a coin in and 1 to start. Sound stays off until you interact with the page, which is the browser's rule rather than ours. And some titles will misbehave or refuse to run: emulation accuracy varies by system, a few disk images in any archive this size are bad, and there is no way to know which without trying one. Use Next.

What is actually in the catalogue

3,920 titles, every one of them carrying a stated year, because an undated item is discarded rather than assumed old. The weight sits where the home computer boom did: 1980s (2,011), 1990s (1,863), 1970s (46). The largest shelves are MS-DOS (500), Arcade (500), Commodore 64 (500).

This is a selection and not a copy of the Archive. Each system contributes its most-downloaded titles, which is the Archive's own popularity signal and is roughly the set people arrive looking for. The full libraries run far deeper than that, and the deep end is mostly regional releases, duplicate dumps and things that were never any good: the Commodore 64 collection alone holds more than 98,000 items. If what you want is not here it is probably still on the Archive, and the search on their own site reaches everywhere ours does not.

One system in the list is not like the others. Everything else here was sold in a box for a machine somebody owned, while the arcade titles are the original coin-op boards, which is why their screens are odd shapes and why they expect a coin before they will do anything at all. They are also the oldest things in the catalogue by a decade, because the arcade had a commercial industry years before anybody had a computer at home to play on.

A sample of what is in the index

Listed for reference so the page is readable without scripting. Use the systems above to actually play.