You can now play old Atari games online, for free

atari

Feeling nostalgic for the video games that you grew up with? Well, you’re not alone. While the PlayStations and Xboxes of today are cool, sometimes it’s just fun to go back and play the games that started the whole video game revolution to begin with. Well, it may be easier than you think to go back in time and revisit your old friends. Archive.org has a collection of the games that you can play online.

Archive.org uses a web-based emulator to run emulations of the games you know and love. The web-based emulator is still in its infancy and does still have some bugs but improvements are being made to make the game play more stable. There are some bugs on some games and there is no sound available on any game yet.

For those who are still trying to figure out how this works, an emulator runs on Read-only memory, or ROM. The game opens in your browser with a set of instructions on how to work the game. For the Atari 2600 games, for example, you use the arrow keys and space bar in order to play the game.

Obviously, not all games are available at this time. Archive.org does have a nice collection from the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Colecovision, Magnavox Odyssey 2, and Astrocade. The kids may think its lame, but it could be a fun way to relive your childhood for a little bit.

[via NBC News, Archive.org]

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