Found quite some gems...

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/ef-2000-2rh

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/echelon-fs

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/falcon-3-0-1x4

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/inferno-2xy

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/tfx-20w

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/chuck-yeagers-air-combat-1xu

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/birds-of-prey-1ck

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/centurion-defender-of-rome-uk


Still wondering if it is completely legal to download from there...

Falcon 3? I don't care if it's legal or not, I'm not touching it ever again!



The Jedi Master

LOL! I still have the fondest memories of it. Look, just last evening I pulled out the original box plus Operation Fighting Tiger's one and all the diskettes are still there and working, the manual is a dream, and I even found inside the box the little notebook I used to keep track of my pilots.

I wrote all the mission we made, tracking down nearly everything. Of course there's a lot of losses! :P

I didn't even improve that much.

Since the question of legality was raised (not sure if only jokingly or for real?):

There is no such thing as "abandonware". Copyright law is independent from active promotion/sales. It's definitely NOT legal to distribute the software, even if the company that made it (e.g. Microprose) no longer exists (in this case, the copyright/IP has been passed on to Hasbro; Hasbro might not actively seek to prevent the distribution of Falcon 3, but that doesn't make it legal).

I still dont get the fascination that some people seem to have with retro gaming. It seems like it has more to do with reliving the days of being younger and not having responsibilities like work and family than it does about revisiting a game that they really think is so awesome that it's worth putting up with the crappy graphics.

Yes, absolutely- My question was serious.
I was actually looking for this sort of explanation, thank you.

Overrated coffee. I could be quartered and drawn by a moose for saying this.

You do strike a nerve here. I do indeed feel a sense of weightlessness- and usually I can't play old games for as long as I play new ones.

With few notable exception-

X-Com (with OpenXcom it's even H-res), I can play that S#!7 for hours and hours...
Mechwarrior 2,3,4- Even though it's quite a lot I don't fire'em up.
Falcon 3- Hands down I can't care about graphics.
VGA age Graphical Adventure or the point-and-click type- LucasArts, Sierra, you name them I legally own them (thanks Steam and GOG.COM!), I just can't bear text parsers...

Probably some more, but then I't just an exercise of memory---

Actually this "field" of gaming it's one of those I feel more open to debate, no matter the opinion.
I'd still prefer constructive debate, but...

For me, some games, like SimCity 2000 in DOS, were just clean and well done. Others I play because I never had them back in the day but was interested, or sometimes didn't have the time or patience (Harpoon I'm looking at you!) back then.

Um, I think you posted in the wrong thread! Seems like you need more coffee. lol

Well, with all these old games there's always the aspect of morality more than legality. The question I ask my self all the time is: can I buy this? No. Can I buy a modern rendition of this from the same guys? No. So, what lose of revenue do I inflict on the developer? None.

If the thing comes out on GOG or something in the future, then go and buy it, but I'm not gonna sit there wishing I could play a game that the developer abandoned and forgot about long time ago.

Is like stealing candy from a kid, everybody wins. :P

There is more to games then just "ooh�shiny". Too many games made now are all form but no substance�much like a beautiful blonde bombshell that has an IQ of 20.

Falcon 3 Gold still had a lot of bugs and limitations. I can understand playing F4:AF or BMS or whatever, but never F3. Last time I tried it was not long before F4 came out and the tying of certain in-game functions to processor clocks meant that I pushed my thrust to 100% for takeoff--and accelerated to such a speed I ripped off my gear and exploded in like 2 seconds!



The Jedi Master

Because you forgot to disable the Turbo button on your PC.

Memories get better each passing day.

LOL. Your right.

For me 'abandonware' is a chance to play games I missed the first time around (didn't join the pc club until '96). Now that we have gog you can even do it legally!

Or he wasn't running moslo. I had F3 running on a Win95 P133 in the early 2000s because my Win98 P3-350 continually BSODd with JF15. Moslo with the brakes set at about 97% made F3 run the same as it had on my 486SX25 I first played it on.

Speaking to the idea of retro games and nostalgia; I have Fighter Squadron: SDOE and it runs fine and has a bunch of mods but compared to IL-2 it's pretty horrible, I also have Red Baron 3D and it is just a shade below WOFF compared to Rise of Flight and while it's fun to compare their individual Pros and Cons the newer games are much more enjoyable graphically though some of the features of the older games are pretty decent for what they had to work with, the story or campaign in most cases made up for how primitive the game graphics appeared and you got a pretty big manual to go with it. Nowadays you're lucky if you get anything but brief instruction on how to install. I did however get EF 2000 and managed to get it installed and working, getting my joystick to properly work however is going to be a bit harder although there is a front end program called EF2000 Reloaded that makes it possible to use Track-Ir and modern digital controllers so I'm giving it a shot for the experience. Some of the games on that site I actually played way back when on a friends system and are what made me finally get into PC's so I could play them too, by then they were long gone. It's amazing that what they look like in the screenshots now looking back are no where near as good as my memory of playing them was.