The Abandonware is an Anglo-Saxon word (formed by. abandoned y software) which defines all digital software that while still under the copyright umbrella has been discontinued by its authors..
In this group can be included any type of application, although it applies mostly to games and that is where we are going to focus this special, with the aim of enjoying those great classic titles (or relive them if you had the opportunity to play them in their day), with a level of graphics and sound that accuses the passage of time, but with a playability and fun that many of the current ones would like for themselves.
Legal issues surrounding Abandonware
In this section I would like to say that the abandonware is in a bit of legal limbo, halfway between the shareware and the freewarebecause on the one hand they are still subject to copyright, but on the other hand they are not applied in practice. Thus, it is not recognized as a method of software distribution and does not have any legal support.
And you may ask, if a studio has discontinued a game and is not supposed to do business with it anymore, why can’t it be used freely? The question is answered in the questionable copyright regulations which allow copyright to be maintained for ever and ever even if no one profits from it. In the case of this group of software they may be in various legal situations:
- The owner ceased to exist without ever transferring the copyright to another entity.
- The owner is still in business, but no longer sells the software and does not spend time or money to defend its rights.
- It is unclear who the current copyright holder is, making it impossible for anyone to buy, defend or claim copyright.
In practice, most producers don’t bother and this group of software is tacitly allowed because it simply doesn’t pay for a production company to take legal action against the sites that offer to download them, which we will see later. Of course, until the games become public domain or the owners do not open them as open source or freeware, they can demand rights and sometimes, when it is in their interest for commercial reasons, they do it as it happened with the -incomprehensible- battle of Nintendo against the ROM portals.
Abandonware, where to get games?
Having said the above and at your discretion, while you can enjoy these great games to the fullest. Personally, there is no lack of an emulator on my PC and some classic tales that I relive from time to time and enjoy them almost as much as when I played them 25 years ago. Of course, don’t expect visual effects like ray tracing :D. The relentless passage of technological time takes its toll, but you’re sure to have fun.
There are web pages that fortunately keep them alive. Not all of them are equally updated, but there are hundreds of them that can be downloaded. Here are the main ones:
Abandonware Two
A portal dedicated specially to DOS games although it also has a part of games for Windows. Each title has its rating, legal status, release date, screenshots and most of them, a video of the game itself as a trailer that are a joy in themselves. It has a search engine to find the game by title, genre or release date and links to the offers of classic games from the digital store GOG.com, which, if you really like you can buy at pyrrhic prices to have them legally and as a thank you to the developer. A very complete and perfectly updated site.
Abandonia
Perhaps one of the first portals dedicated to this group of games since it was created in 1999. After some time of inactivity it came back to light coinciding with the increase of interest in retro games. It offers an index of “abandonware” titles dedicated to classic games that were published for the MS-DOS operating system. Some are no longer supported by the publisher and others less so, the copyrights have expired. It hosts nearly 1,200 downloadable games, most of them analyzed, with screenshots and scores from the publisher and users.
GamesNostalgia
A site totally dedicated to retrogaming , abandonware and old classic games from the past. You can browse by genre, year, platform or developer and download them for free. Most of them are DOS or Amiga games, but they also have Windows, Commodore 64, Atari ST and other systems. Of note, the administrators test, configure and package all games with the appropriate emulator. Well updated, they add games frequently.
RGB Classic Games
The portal offers a large catalog of classic DOS games, unreleased titles and even some “modern” DOS titles. The entire site is “dedicated to the preservation of classic games for defunct computer operating systems.”such as DOS, CP/M-86, OS/2, Win16 and Windows 9x, as well as to facilitate their execution on modern systems.
MyAbandonware
We haven’t counted them, but they claim to have about 14,000 games. Most of them are classics from the 80s and 90s and cover a lot of platform, from DOS to Sega, Genesis, Commodore or Atari. Like the previous ones, it allows you to select them by name, genre or year of release.
Remain In Play
Another web site that offers a good collection of DOS, Windows and other games, but focused on commercial games that were intentionally released as freeware. It doesn’t have the best interface on the planet but it does have good games like the other portals, a search engine, top-10 and top-250 with those considered the best. It’s been years since the portal was updated, but they have a good collection.
The Internet Archive
Not to be missed to finish the non-profit digital library dedicated to the preservation of archives and content, as it also includes a good collection of MS-DOS titles. They cannot be downloaded, but thanks to the integrated emulator they can be played directly on the Web.
How to run Abandonware games
The vast majority of these games were published for DOS systems and for them there is a perfect application: DOSBox. This is a full-featured CPU emulator that recreates a DOS-like environment on modern computers. It is free, free and multiplatform softwarewith support for Windows, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD and other alternatives.
Of course, there are others capable of running such games on all platforms such as FreeDOS and others that can be played without installing anything from a web browser, as is the case with The Internet Archive which has its own integrated emulator.
Another possibility is to use virtual machines with applications such as Oracle VirtualBox, VMware or Windows Virtual PC. There you can install for example a MS-DOS or a copy of Windows XP. Professional versions of Windows 7 also included a special feature called “Windows XP Mode”, which functioned as a virtual operating system and as a means to open older programs within Windows 7.
In all cases and keeping in mind the legal issues that unfortunately still weigh on many of them, we can only tell you. enjoy these great games!
