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Posted by: NickTheGreek 13 Jul 2006, 11:20 AM

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. http://www.exiled-gamers.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=1701, http://www.exiled-gamers.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=1734,
and http://www.exiled-gamers.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=573 article:





“ScummVM 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.”




http://www.scummvm.org/

Abandonware

Posted by: NickTheGreek 13 Jul 2006, 11:21 AM

Abandonware is computer software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder. Sometimes, it is used as a blanket category for any software over a certain age, usually five years.

The term has no legal meaning. This means that labeling any kind of software 'abandonware' does not make it legal to use it without paying or make copies of it. Unless the author puts the software in the public domain, any and all abandonware remains covered under copyright law until its copyright term expires.

Alternatively, the term is also used for software which is still available, but on which further support and development have been intentionally discontinued. This article discusses only the first meaning.