Play FriendlyWare P.C. Arcade Online
Dig through 30 weird DOS-era BASIC programs—dodge ASCII pits, lob pixel bananas at buildings, and accidentally take a corporate personality test from 1987.
Game Overview
FriendlyWare P.C. Arcade is this weird little time capsule from the early DOS days—basically a bundle of 30 BASIC programs that came with some old IBM PCs. Half of them feel like tech demos, but there are some legit gems in there if you dig around.
You've got ASCII MAN, which is exactly what it sounds like—a stick figure platformer made entirely of keyboard characters. STAR FIGHTER TX-16 surprised me with its clunky-but-addictive space combat, and GORILLA GORILLA is basically QBasic Gorillas before QBasic Gorillas existed (throw bananas at buildings, you know the drill). Some of the "business" tools are unintentionally hilarious now—like software that analyzes your personality through 1980s corporate psychobabble.
It's janky, it's nostalgic, and some games barely qualify as functional. But there's something charming about seeing what people could squeeze out of BASIC back when computers still booted from floppies.
Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".
Download FriendlyWare P.C. Arcade ROM
You can download this ROM to play FriendlyWare P.C. Arcade offline using an MS-DOS emulator (Top Emulators).
*This ROM is provided for backup and educational purposes only.
