Wednesday, 1st January 2020

Abandonware DOS in 2019: what's changed and what's new

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who donated a few bucks to help me keep working on Abandonware DOS. THANK YOU, THANK YOU and again THANK YOU!

In 2019 I changed the way that I usually add content on Abandonware DOS. This means that it takes me less time to add games, take screenshots, add articles, etc.

As for everything else... here's a quick list of some work what I've done this year on Abandonware DOS:

Finally finished writing the descriptions of (almost) every keyword.
Revamped the statistics page.
Added a "Featured document" box in the homepage.
Added the "also published for" field with info about other platforms.
Tweaked and cleaned the web design across all pages.
Decided to drop a lot of "additional details" taken from Wikipedia to lower the quantity of non-original text on Abandonware DOS (that should improve SEO).
Added a lot of "retro reviews": short excerpts of reviews published on old magazines decades ago or taken from defunct video gaming sites.
Company details pages were in fact two for each company: one for developed games and one for published games. Now there's only a single page for each company, listing both developed and published games.
Merged both the list of developers and publishers into a single companies list.
Remade the game designers section: new info, more games.
Re-created every single miniature image making them slightly bigger.
Redone the "play online" pages. I replaced the existing javascript code with the latest version of the Emularity libraries for better performance and compatibility.
Dropped the whole subgenre system in favor of tags and keywords.
Reached the "1900 games online" milestone!
Added splash screens for a lot of games
I also started to update info and downloads for the very first games I uploaded on Abandonware DOS a long time ago.

That's all!

Unfortunately a death in my family took away a lot of my free time, so I was unable to work more on Abandonware DOS.

I hope you like the state of Abandonware DOS today. I planned quite a few features for 2020... but the main focus will be: more content, more games.