The gaslighting by the games industry is real, I felt like having a play through of Rome Total War recently and the remastered edition is completely bugged and unplayable and I mean you really can't even click on buttons after awhile because the third party studio they contracted to mess with the original fucked it up so badly. I'm not even sure if I try playing Baldur's Gate I want to experience the crappy 'enhanced' edition and I'd rather play it in it's original form. It's kind of remarkable how none of the reviews are mentioning how broken some of these releases are.
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Even if you get originals, you run into the problem of OS compatibility. Not every old game runs well on Windows 10/11, especially stuff that came out when Windows98 is what everyone ran at home.
Regarding the original Baldur's Gate on CD, has anyone had a notion to set up some sort of peer to peer thing where people can ask the group who has original install media for a title, and those with a copy in their possession can respond?
I still have CD binders full of old original install media, and have optical media drives I can burn copies with.
Virtual machines are becoming a necessity for retro gaming.
Oh hey, I didn't think about that. You're right, modern hardware is certainly powerful enough to run older operating systems in a VM and run an older game. Hmmmm. I'll have to think about that, and see if I can devise a way to create older OS ISO images that are patched up as much as they can be.
It's already been done somewhere and there must be guides for it.
That's how fucking bugged some of these remasters are though, it's easier to get the originals working on them than these shitty butchered versions. I mean, I'm still annoyed at the audio bug in Halo MCC.
I have Halo 1 and 2 on CD. Baldur's Gate, too. :p
There's certainly a cutoff period for this. Post-DOS and pre-Windows XP. I can't remember, but I think a lot of it occurred with games that relied on DirectX versions that came out before DX9.
XP broke a lot of DOS games because it wasn't based on DOS the way Win95, Win98, WinME were.
Then later on Win7 broke some XP games because MS went hard and heavy on restructuring device driver APIs for power management and security reasons based on XP being the massive success it was, and those two things becoming much more important than they were when XP came out.
DosboxX or PCEmu will often play stuff that requires Win98 or before.
For things that run on XP, I would recommend VMWare ESXi with your graphics card running through PCI passthrough. It doesn't handle 100% of all games (I've seen one or two that detect that combo as "cheating"), but it handles a lot.
My primary gaming rig runs ESXi with a bunch of VMs set up with various operatiing systems, and my graphics card is just old enough that I can find an old XP NVIDIA driver for a different card of the same architecture that works with it.
Most official places to get originals are gone. You will have to check old torrents if they are still alive. Or find the cds :D
It's one reason I appreciate whoever the fuck put mech commander up online for free
Tbh I only got MechCommander 2, is it worth to try the first one?
The first one is much better imo. I didn't enjoy the second one as much.
It’s worth mentioning Usenet. With the right service provider you can still download files uploaded back in 2008-2009.
Well that's shit isn't it? This is why I'm mostly messing with Godot and Blender these days :( lol
It's a bit off topic but it's been a while since I've shilled it and you look like someone who might appreciate a retro looking game with excellent gameplay mechanics. Zero-K is a free, open source RTS game in the style of total annihilation/supreme commander, that honestly puts any modern RTS released in the last decade to shame. They also have a steam installer if that's your jam.
You might want to read the FAQ on their website, the UI alone has so much depth to it to streamline the micro and tweak the powerful unit automation.
Nice,Not often you see a springRTS engine game. Thought most of the games in that engine stayed as prototypes.
LOL already saw that ages ago, it looks interesting, but I could never get into the supreme commander games because of the micro-management even though I loved the concept. When it comes to RTS games even though I understand them I'm a bit of a filthy casual. I definitely approve of that kind of project though I wish people would do more because we can't trust the big studios to even leave classics alone now.
If I can shill even more, one of the big focuses of that project is making the units and UI smarter to reduce the micro load.
But TBH it can still be kind of a handful, just because all the improvements let you quickly scale up to the point it becomes hard to handle again.
Unless you join 16v16 multiplayer clusterfuck games that are always running. There's not enough room for you to have more territory than you can handle in those. It's just hard to follow everyone else.
Yeah, it's the same with games like Starcraft 2 though and that's on a bit of a smaller scale. My brain just isn't really built for that level of clicky clicky and hotkey mashing, obviously they're on another level but as part of my research into RTS' I am watching how the professionals play and their speed is absolutely insane. It's like watching 4D chess players on steroids.
I tend to enjoy city builders and base building because that's more relaxed, which might sound weird because I've hated on open world games so much that offer that but city builder RTS stuff is a totally different genre to that when you look at the economics side of things. I like it because it's building with a real purpose, whereas in open world games I often feel it can get boring fast. Command and Conquer was the game that provided the most balance for me with regards to that. I'm actually quite good at those games because, it's simpler.
Heh, fair enough.
Since I can't help shilling my fave games today I can also recommend Against the Storm if you're into city builder style games. Excellent breadth and depth of strategies and the short game cycles and many difficulty levels do a good job of pushing you to keep trying and evolving different approaches.
Yeah, Zero-K is one of the bigger spawns from the old TA-Spring project. There's other free standalone games and mods that came out of all of that, but Zero-K was probably one of the newest and most ambitious, even though they sat around for about a decade trying to decide when they'd feel like the game/mod was ready for a Steam release.
Yep, although if you bought the old version before they were removed you still got them, It is the one thing gog and itch does well that they give you a installer.
According to google you get the original versions of Baldurs Gate when you buy the EE on GOG.
Also if you own the rome total war remake apparently you can download the original from steam
Can confirm that gog will give you the old version of BG if have the EE, it is a bit hidden though.
This is good to know, especially when considering how abandonware sites will often direct you to purchasable remasters of older games instead.
One place I could point out that occasionally has some older games for easy download is the InternetArchive. Not that the site's management is without some controversy, but most of that doesn't apply with this kind of situation.
Check redump.org. It's a video game preservation site that mostly specializes in console discs but also has info on some PC games.
The site itself doesn't have downloads, but it does give you hashes and other information you can use to validate that a download you find is legit. And oftentimes you can find the downloads on archive.org (search for the name of the game + "redump"). Also sometimes if you do a google search using the hash you can find copies that way.
I had a similar desire the other day to play through GTA: San Andreas, and that's how I found my copy.
And I'll just say that if you search for "Rome Total War" with media type "software" on archive.org you will find a copy of it (though I would recommend validating the hashes with those on redump to make sure they're unadulterated).
Still got a vintage machine with CRT to play these games on but these games are temporal black holes. They devour your time and then mock and laugh at you when you fail.
GoG lets you download the originals or Enhanced efitions of BG/IWD
Only specifically commenting about BG:EE. IMHO, it's worth playing the enhanced edition at this point. It took Beamdog a long time to get it right, but it's quite fun on a tablet too.
You can completely ignore the new characters if you want.
The one I really miss is Warcraft III. The enhanced edition is just such dogshit.
Agreed. There are mods to remove the beamdog characters too, if you really dislike them. Other than that it's just the same old game, with a few tweaks for modern PCs.
Pretty sure the Baldur's Gate Enchanced editions come bundled with the originals if you buy it off of GoG. Not sure if I got grandfathered in but at the very least they're still hosted on their servers and I still have the installers, so I could probably hack together a way to get them to you if you're truly determined.
If it's DOS era it's probably in eXoDOS.