Missing those days you whiled away as a youth playing Pac-Man or Street Fighter 2 at the arcade? A collection of old games online can now let you relive those moments, all from your own computer. The Internet Arcade has 901 titles from the 1970s through the 1990s available for free at Archive.org, thanks to the efforts of the Internet Archive and the Jsmess Project.
Many are classic games like Astro Blaster, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Q*bert and Street Fighter 2, a classic of digital fist fighting. All can now be played in modern browsers.
Technically, the games are realised in a JavaScript emulator, which rebuilds the arcade hall hardware within a browser. The designers recommend using Mozilla's Firefox browser, but, theoretically, any game should work on any browser with up-to-date JavaScript.
All you need is a keyboard to control the action. No other hardware is needed.
Putting this virtual arcade online is part of the Jsmess project, which is working to preserve gaming classics.
The addition of the more than 900 arcade titles builds up the collection at Archive.org, which has for months made available classic console games from machines like the Atari 2600 or the Sega Mega Drive.
Yet another area contains an archive of games from the dawn of the PC gaming era, along with other applications.
Archive.org is a non-commercial US portal devoted to archiving the internet. Its Wayback Machine service lets users call up old versions of websites, creating a kind of library for researchers and historians, whether professional or amateur.
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