In the beginning of the VOGONS forum, less ambitious emulators like VDMSound GliDOS, and OpenGLide also had a great deal of traffic on their forums. This was the original intent of the VOGONS forum, as VOGONS stands for Very Old Games on New Systems. GoG is emblematic about getting DOS games to run on modern hardware with a minimum of fuss. I have been generally indifferent to GoG on this blog. Sony has a Playstation and Playstation 2 classic line for the Playstation 3. When the Nintendo Wii was introduced in 2006, it introduced the Virtual Console which allowed players to buy select console games, which were emulated on the current system. Mostly these were limited to arcade and console games. Actually, since early "authentic" releases like Microsoft's Return of the Arcade series simulated arcade games, the concept goes back even further. Selling old games to run on systems which they were never intended to be played on is not new and has been around as long as emulation has been around. GoodOldGames, now just GoG, would bundle the game files with a preconfigured version of DOSBox to launch the game. In 2008, the site GoodOldGames began to sell DOS games. Vivendi/Universal did just that when it released The King's Quest Collection in 2006. However, companies like Activision discovered that the open source nature of DOSBox freely allowed them to make their older catalog titles available again. While companies like id Software and Apogee and 3D Realms were happy to sell from their back catalogs online, their combined output was only a very small portion of games available for DOS. DOSBox had been in development since 2002, but for the first few years the software was still improving to the point where it could be counted on to run most games. While there were narrowly-focused projects to emulate game engines like Exult, Frotz and SCUMMVM, there was no easy to use general solution for playing DOS games. The ability to play DOS games with a sound card was often unsuccessful. Windows XP was generally less compatible than Windows 98SE with DOS games. Getting DOS games to run in the first half of year 2000 decade was often an exercise in frustration. There were also sites like Game Trading Zone, which I used to make a few trades and purchases before it went to a subscriber only format. Occasionally you could find some games in bargain bins or on a compilation CD, but generally speaking, if you wanted to purchase a DOS game, you went on ebay or a similar site. DOS games were no longer generally being sold commercially, with certain exceptions, at retail after the 1990s.
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