
They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories. DOS has remained consistent in some ways over the last (nearly) 40 years, but a lot has changed under the hood and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup. Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps. What makes the collection more than just a pile of old, now-playable games, is how it has to take head-on the problems of software preservation and history.

The update of these MS-DOS games comes from a project called eXoDOS, which has expanded over the years in the realm of collecting DOS games for easy playability on modern systems to tracking down and capturing, as best as can be done, the full context of DOS games – from the earliest simple games in the first couple years of the IBM PC to recently created independent productions that still work in the MS-DOS environment.
