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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's one reason I appreciate whoever the fuck put mech commander up online for free
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
Virtual machines are becoming a necessity for retro gaming.
It's already been done somewhere and there must be guides for it.
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.