English
If instead of on the game page, you see this icon:
It means that this game is either still sold or actively protected by copyright holder or an anti-piracy organisation the copyright holder is a member of (such as ESA).
THESE GAMES ARE NOT DOWNLOADABLE.
WE WON'T HELP YOU IN FINDING DOWNLOADS OF THEM.
ASKING FOR DOWNLOAD LINKS WILL RESULT IN WARNING / BAN.
Yes. We used to have freeware games as well, but we decided they were important enough to create a whole new site dedicated just to them. It is called Abandonia Reloaded and you can find it on http://www.reloaded.org. We also have exclusive rights to host some of the games on the site. Only the copyright holder can give this kind of permission.
Because if we did...
I think The Chosen's short comic explains it quite well.
Every game on this site is checked for viruses! We try to make all games we supply appear just as they did in their original packagings (or as close to that as possible)!
The game is available for download. Just click the "Download this game" button and the download will commence!
The game is backed up with extras such as manuals, walkthroughs, codes etc.
A link to box scans of the game can be found in the extras box on the game page.
Music from the game can be separately downloaded in the music section or by following a link in the extras box.
That depends on how you intend to run them. If you have a pure DOS environment set-up, just for playing old games, then you are probably not reading this FAQ.
With VDMSound, all recent computers should have no problems running the games. With DOSBox, a 1,5 Ghz CPU is recommended and certain games may require 2 Ghz or more to run smoothly. You should also have at least 512 MB of RAM if you're running Windows XP, or 1 GB if you're running Windows Vista.
There's a special part of our forum called Requests where you can request games to be put on the site.
The site staff will check whether or not the game in question is abandoned and accordingly to the result approve your request or - if it can't be approved - file it for re-evaluation at a later date.
Make sure that the game in question is abandonware (use our oldwarez search engine).
When you have done that, post a message about it in the Requests forum and be sure to specify WHICH game you wish to contribute and give some details about it.
After that, if the game you propose is appropriate for the site, you will soon be notified with the login info for the FTP server where you can upload it.
If you have original extras that we don't have on the site already, then we are more than happy to add them. Just contact us using the Requests forum and state which extra you would like to contribute, and for which game.
However, if you got an extra from another site, we cannot publish it on Abandonia (so we are not interested).
Since a lot of games are still sold or protected by ESA, we placed an icon that represents games' availability in the overall listing. You can see a legend of all icons further below.
Wikipedia: "Abandonware is computer software which is no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder. Alternately, the term is also used for software which is still available, but on which further support and development has been deliberately discontinued."
Since the software is no longer sold or supported, the copyright holders are not directly harmed in any way. This is why abandonware sites are, for the most part, ignored by the law.
The distribution of copyrighted software however is, and will allways be, illegal!
Until November 2007, the site included a VIP section that featured exclusive content that could not be given out to everyone because of bandwidth limitations.
VIP status was granted to users who made significant contributions to the site's content (whether in form of reviews, translations, game archives or otherwise).
During the site upgrade in November 2007, the VIP section has been removed and presently there are no plans to set up a new one. No promotions to VIP rank are conducted at the time.
You will become a member of ever growing comunity, that is warm, welcoming and offers help and support in numerous ways (technical, troubleshooting etc). By using the forums you will also learn how Abandonia breathes, what goes on, and you can get noticed for VIP memberships.
In addition, certain forums can only be read by registered users.
Make sure you look at the compatibility info that is displayed for each game. If it says that the game can only be run using DosBox and doesn't have a WinXP compatibility icon, obviously it will not work under WindowsXP. Also, make sure you have read any technical notes or important information listed at the end of the game's review! There is also a link to "Discuss this game" in the extras section of each game. It often contains important information so read all the posts carefully. If you are trying to use DosBox but don't know how to work with it, read on, this is also covered in FAQ. However, if you have exhausted all the possibilities, and stil can't get the game to run, you can post your problem in the troubleshooting forum and make sure you state the following details:
- System Hardware Specification
- Game in question
- OS (e.g. Windows 98/XP)
- Whether or not you used Dosbox or VDMSound to run it?
- What error message you got
Most of the games on our site were made for MS-DOS. Back then, the standards for how the games are supposed to communicate with sound hardware were quite different from the way they are now - the results you already know.
There only sure way to get them working with sound is by running them through either VDMSound or DOSBox. You can get both from our programs section.
There are several guides to choose from:
Abandonia's Official DosBox Guide written by Anubis
A beginner's guide to DOSBox written by The Fifth Horseman
wtf IS dos bOX AND DOES IT WORK ON wIN xp??? (DA MOVIE) by Japofran
and finally Basic Setup and Installation of DOSBox on the program's homepage.
For DOS-based games (with the DOS compatibility icon), there are DOSBox versions for each of these systems.
For Windows-based ones (with only the Windows compatibility icon), you'll either have to use WINE (on Linux) or a complete virtual machine (there's a number of them out there, both for Mac and Linux).
There's a window titled "extras" on every game page (the one with review and screenshots) under the general info about the game, and above the Rate box.
If there are no files in the 'extras', and you are certain that the game requires them, you can ask for help in that game's corresponding topic in Abandonia Games Discussion forum.
Unfortunately we can't distribute speech packs with most games. They are usually very big in size, and would consume huge amounts of bandwidth.
In addition, a lot of very old titles simply didn't have speech packs to begin with.