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Welcome to DOSGAME.AT!

Dear everyone!

First of all, we'd like to warmly welcome you to DOSGAME.AT. We are Eric Steiner and Michael Trede.

Why DOSGAME.AT?

But why did we create DOSGAME.AT in the first place? What is the point of this project? After all, there are already major projects such as eXoDOS and TOSEC whose mission is to preserve the vast archive of DOS software. So what difference can a small project like ours possibly make?

Well, the answer isn't quite that simple. I had very close ties to eXoDOS for quite some time and even created a number of cracks for the project. I was also invited into its private VIP channel. Eventually, however, I decided to move on because I wanted to invest my work into building something of my own. Another reason was that I became increasingly uncomfortable with what I felt was a constant disregard for the intellectual property behind many of the games. eXoDOS includes virtually every game it can find, regardless of whether it is still being sold on platforms such as Steam or GOG. Needless to say, the rights holders are generally not contacted, even when that would be possible.

There is another challenge as well. Whenever no Scene crack exists for a particular game, the eXoDOS project depends on someone reverse engineering the protection from scratch. That still happens from time to time, and as I mentioned, I contributed several myself. The number of people capable of doing this kind of work is very small, however, and most of them are external contributors. As a result, the project's primary focus naturally seems to lean more toward collecting software than producing clean preservation work. And that made me think: surely this could be done better.

Our Approach

DOSGAME.AT is our attempt to fill that gap in a fair and respectful way. Many old Scene cracks are excellent and deserve great respect, but others are not particularly clean, and many games have no crack at all or only one that supports a single older version. Michael and I kept running into these situations over and over again.

Our goal is therefore to close this gap by creating clean loaders for those missing games and unsupported software versions, allowing people who own the original game files to run them without unnecessary obstacles. That is also why we initially concentrated so heavily on copy protection. We already have many more games waiting to be released, and they will gradually appear on the website over time.

Classic DOS Trainers

After a while, another topic caught our attention: trainers for classic DOS games. Back in the day, a trainer was simply a utility that allowed you to cheat in a game, for example by giving yourself unlimited lives or unlimited energy. Many of those old trainers can still be found today on Defacto2 (which will become part of our Honored Links page once it goes online). The problem is that around 80% of those trainers no longer work properly under DOSBox. So once again, there is room for improvement. This is another area where we hope DOSGAME.AT can establish itself. Several of our releases already include trainer functionality, and we expect that number to continue growing in the future.

About the Website

I'll be covering many of the topics I've mentioned here in separate blog articles over time, but before I finish I'd like to say a few words about the website itself. We built it completely from scratch and this time without WordPress. Yes, there actually was an older version of the website, although I doubt many people ever saw it. Today, with tools like Codex and similar technologies, there are much better ways to build a custom CMS tailored exactly to your own needs. I may write about that in more detail later if there's enough interest. For now, our DOSGAME.CMS is still very much a beta project, and it will almost certainly remain one until at least 2027 as we continue developing and expanding it.

If you happen to discover a bug or something that doesn't work quite right, please let us know through the contact form.

One Last Thing

Well... this turned out to be much longer than I expected, and it's probably not the most structured piece of writing you'll ever read. It's been a long day, and I simply wanted to sit down and write a blog post without worrying too much about structure or polish. I hope you won't mind. The next ones will be better. I promise.

See you around!

Eric