Enlarge / DOS_deck is an impressive technical feat, sure. But it’s also a very keen curation of some DOS shareware classics (pun somewhat intended). (credit: DOS_deck/Martin Kool)

Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody’s idea of fun.

DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Command & Conquer, and Syndicate, with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you’re using to read this post.

In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple levels of Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I’ve taken another punctuation break to play the first level of Syndicate, which moves much faster than I remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to and move around, and there’s a host of little extras to appreciate, including constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain games as favorites.