• Friday Time-Waster: Play DOS Games In Your Chrome Browser

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Friday, August 12th, 2011
    Screen Shot 2011-08-12 at 11.37.11 AM

    NaClBox (get it?) is a port of DOSBox that allows DOS games to be played right in your browser. Right now you can play titles like Star Wars Tie Fighter complete with multi-voice MIDI sound and hot hot VGA graphics. It works on Macs, PCs, and Linux machines and runs under Chrome 13.

    To play the games, you have to turn on the Chrome Native Client (Na Cl, hence the pun):

    In the Chrome address bar, type:

    about:flags

    Find the section titled “Native Client”

    Click “Enable” and restart Chrome.


    The game downloads and you’re ready to play a moment later. The most interesting thing to note is that this is how games will probably be played under ChromeOS – right in the browser with almost no lag. If this is better or worse than services like Steam I’m not willing to argue, but it does point to some very interesting upcoming features for the OS.

    The site has been around for a while but they’ve added some new games and I suspect I just made a few folks’ days with this delightful Hackernews discovery.

    Project Page


    Company: Google
    Website: google.com
    Launch Date: September 7, 1998
    IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

    Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

    → Learn more