If you've ever tried playing classic Windows games in a browser, you'll understand this pain instantly. You invest time into a game, finally reach a good checkpoint, hit "Save"… close the tab… come back later… and your save is gone. Poof. As if it never existed.

That was the reality for quite a number of Lemon Web Windows games for a long time, especially those running on Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows 98 under js-dos. The games ran. They looked great. Performance was fine. But saving progress reliably? That part was frustrating, inconsistent, and honestly a deal-breaker for longer games.

That changes now.

What Was Actually Broken Before

The old setup relied on a traditional js-dos disk image approach. While this worked well for launching games, it had a major weakness: disk writes were not always flushed properly before the browser session ended.

In simple terms, the game thought it saved, but the browser didn't always commit that data to storage in time. Close the tab too quickly or switch apps on mobile, and your progress was lost.

For short arcade-style games, that's annoying. For RPGs, strategy games, or anything that expects you to save often, it's a nightmare.

The Big Shift: Moving Everything to Sockdrive

I've now fully migrated all Lemon Web Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows 98 games to a sockdrive-based js-dos setup.

This isn't just a backend tweak. Sockdrive fundamentally changes how disk data is streamed and written:

The most important part: in-game saves finally persist properly.

You can save inside the game, close the tab, come back later, and your progress is still there. The way it should have been from day one.

The Extra Step That Makes It Rock Solid

On top of switching to sockdrive, I also added a few reliability safeguards in the runtime layer:

All of this happens silently in the background. No popups, no interruptions, no extra buttons. Just reliable saving.

Why This Matters for Retro Games

Classic PC games were designed with saving in mind. Strategy titles, simulations, adventure games, and long-form DOS and Windows titles assume you'll come back tomorrow and continue where you left off. Playing them without save support breaks the experience entirely. With this fix in place, Lemon Web Games now feels much closer to running these titles on a real old PC, minus the headaches of vintage hardware.

What This Means Going Forward

If you're playing any Windows-based game on Lemon Web now:

This was a long-standing frustration, and I'm genuinely happy to say it's now resolved across the board. If you ever stopped playing a game because saving didn't work properly before, this is a good time to give it another go.