First post, by superformosa
Dear Vogons,
I'm new here. Hello world!
The first game I ever played was 4x4 Off Road Racing on our family's first DOS computer, an IBM XT 286. My whole life I have dutifully made backups of my backups of my backups, and finally I've uploaded the contents of the original 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk LINK REMOVED. I wish I could travel back to my 6-year old self and tell me that in the future people could play almost every DOS game in a DOSBox emulator running in their web browser.
So, the reason I'm here is to share a thing I've built: IA Launcher. It's a native DOSBox frontend for the Internet Archive that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It's free and open source software, and the source code contains 2967 Internet Archive URLs. When you select a game using the minimalist user interface it first downloads the ZIP file from the Internet Archive, extracts it, and then starts DOSBox with the correct arguments.
Originally, I created IA Launcher for a games exhibition in the LocHal Library in Tilburg. The goal was to create a child-proof, full-screen, auto-playing collection of MS-DOS games. When you start the program using the command ialauncher --slideshow 10 it will act as a sort of screensaver, showing a random title screen every 10 seconds. I supplied the library with CRT displays and clicky keyboards and many kids had loads of fun with it! Here is a photo of IA Launcher running on two CRT monitors:
It's just a simple side project (don't expect too much of it) but I hope it will be of interest to other Vogons. You can download IA Launcher on my website: ialauncher.created.today
Finally, I realize this post counts as self-promotion, so please accept my apologies if this sort of thing if frowned upon here.
