Remember the old days of the arcade when you would wait in line at the Street Fighter II machine while your buddy was over in the cornet playing Q*Bert ? Well now you can relive those days. The guys behind Internet Archive have opened up the Internet Arcade, a website that allows you to play tons of classic arcade games, completely unedited, right in your browser.
The website uses JSMESS, a program that is meant to emulate older computer systems in Javascript. The coding of the games are left alone, but the emulation itself has been tweaked. Unfortunately, this does mean some games are partially broken, according to programmer Jason Scott.
“Of the roughly 900 arcade games (yes, nine hundred arcade games) up there, some are in pretty weird shape – vector games are an issue, scaling is broken for some, and some have control mechanisms that are just not going to translate to a keyboard or even a joypad,” Scott said. “But damn if so many are good enough. More than good enough. In the right browser, on a speedy machine, it almost feels perfect. The usual debates about the ‘realness’ of emulation come into play, but it works.”
Source: Internet Arcade