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Remember Strider? How about SWIV? Perhaps Dungeon Master rings a faint bell with you? Or how about more recent titles, Freespace 2? System Shock 2?
– care to guess what these games (and many other older titles) have in common?



The one uniting factor for the eclectic list of games above is that you have little to no hope of picking up a copy at retail these days. In fact, your best bet would be to search for these titles on eBay - and even then, the chances of you managing to find a copy are very slim indeed.



So, is this it for games of the by-gone era? Unless we were wise enough to protect our game disks then, in all legal senses, yes -
the game has passed any real commercial use to the company, and will now be condemned to nostalgic memories of the gamers it left behind.



Companies such as Codemasters, Rockstar and Illusion Softworks occasionally break the mould, allowing us to re-sample the games we played many years
ago. Treasure Island Dizzy (Codemasters), BMX Simulator (Codemasters), Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar), Grand Theft Auto 2 (Rockstar),
and Hidden and Dangerous Deluxe (Illusion Softworks) have all been released for free, ScummVM also offers downloads to a few of
yester-years point and click adventures, but for the vast majority of games we're left without any real substance to back up our
rose-tinted nostalgic claims.





Past classics are now almost impossible to come by in the standard retail market, yet can be obtained from the darker corners of the internet
free of charge, where the webmasters can lay claim to have undertaken the noble task of stopping these classic titles slipping into obscurity.



Retro Gaming has quite a following, anyone with any doubt should consider the fact that services such as GameTap
(which will allow you to play many a retro game – from Atari 2600 to the Master System to more recent PC titles - online)
do such good business. However, the path to retro gaming Nirvana is seldom smooth, complications can, all to often, arise -
a few of the more frequent problems being:

• changes to hardware since the games original release;
  
• the inability of modern operating systems to cope with the convoluted program setups that used to mesh with Dos
  via an autoexec.bat file and a config.sys file;
  
• or the fact that it’s near impossible to obtain the game itself.
  

For the first two stumbling blocks people have done what they always do and found ways to deal with the obstacles.
They've developed emulators, both for the hardware and for the operating system.



This is where programs such as, the above mentioned, ScummVM come in, to quote from a 3dvelocity.com article:





β€œScummVM is a 'virtual machine' for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games.



It is designed to run: Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2;
Flight of the Amazon Queen; and games based on Lucas Arts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system.
SCUMM is used for many games, including Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.



There’s no need for using MS-DOS with ScummVM, because it’s a Windows program and uses Windows’ drivers for sound and graphics.





Installing ScummVM and setting it up for a game is a breeze. Just browse to the right directory and ScummVM will do the rest.
All you need to adjust are the volume settings and optionally the graphics filter.
The filter takes care of the nasty edges or pixels in the game graphics and makes it look a whole lot sharper, even at larger resolutions.



Within 5 minutes of installing, I was playing day of the tentacle demo and enjoying old glory. The graphics look amazing due to a nice filter
and the sound is crispy clear, no faults there.”




SCUMMVM Homepage




But what about games that aren’t based on the SCUMM system? How do we get older titles with their roots firmly in DOS to run on
Operating Systems like Windows XP?



Why, with DosBox, of course:




β€œDOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games
that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD.
However, it is not restricted to running only games. In theory, any DOS application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting
DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early developement.”




DOSBox Homepage

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