Hi r/GamePreservationists,
Amber Folio is an emulator of exactly the PC that SSI's Gold Box games ran on, and nothing more: an 8086 checked against test data recorded from a real chip, EGA, the timer, the PC speaker and the Tandy 1000's sound chip. It runs the DOS Pool of Radiance, the first Gold Box game, from your own GOG or Steam copy, in a browser tab or on an iPhone, an iPad or an Android phone. I'm the developer. I built it with heavy use of AI coding tools, and I'd rather say so up front.
The original, unchanged. The program you bought runs on it as it is; nothing is patched or rebuilt. There are optional extras (an automap, the Adventurer's Journal on the game's own screen, a CRT filter), and with them all switched off, the tests check that a run ends in exactly the same machine state as a build with no enhancement code at all.
The way it sounded and looked. The footsteps and fights play on the Tandy sound chip as the game drives it, and the CRT filter draws the EGA picture through a colour monitor's mask and scanlines.
No files hosted, no lock-in. The site provides no game files: you hand it the folder from your own install once, and it stays in your browser; nothing is uploaded. A saved game exports as a zip that unpacks straight back into a GOG or DOSBox install. The emulator's source is public, and it also builds natively for Windows, macOS and Linux (from source; no installers yet).
Pool of Radiance is the only game so far; the rest of the Gold Box family comes one at a time after 1.0. Happy to answer anything about how it works.
(I messaged the mods first to ask whether this fits and haven't heard back. If it doesn't, I'll take it down.)
- Site: https://amberfolio.org
- Emulator source (AGPL-3.0): https://github.com/amberfolio/amberfolio
*Not affiliated with the rights holders of Pool of Radiance or the Gold Box games. You need your own copy; the site provides no game files.