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[jg007]

Hi Guys,

before I used abandonia a large number of my games were from www.classicdosgames.com, the guy who runs the site has worked pretty hard to collect all the games and persuade people to release older games as freeware so I hope you will not mind me posting this.

For a great collection of freeware / shareware games on DVD -

www.classicdosgames.com/store.html

[Reup]

A note for everyone: after discussing this topic in the Mod-only forum, we've decided to allow this link. The software offered on this site is free- and/or shareware. There's no abandonware or ESA-protected oldwarez as far as we've been able to tell.

[Dave]

5 Dollars to look into that link
This is good material since we can't host Sharewarez.
Will we add it to Pinned Topic?

[Nodal]

Hey, maybe I can find a game that I'm looking for there. It has Shareware you say?

[classicdosgames]

Hello everyone.

I'm the webmaster of Classic DOS Games and this thread was pointed out to me. I'm not sure what the mod discussion was about, but I want to assure everyone that Classic DOS Games only carries legal downloads, as stated on the main page. To support that claim, the legal status of each game is listed next to the download link (shareware, freeware, public domain). Most games that are freeware contain a license (usually Creative Commons), other than a small number of games that I was given permission to distribute by an email from the copyright holder. While I do not currently post these emails on the website, I can produce them at a moment's notice should the need arise. I have researched the legality of every download on the website, often speaking to the copyright holder by email or on the phone to be sure. Whenever I'm not sure that a game has been released as freeware, even if other websites are reporting that it has been, I continue to list games as shareware (or whatever the original license was) until I can prove their freeware status. I believe there are more than half a dozen freeware games on my website that I continue to list as shareware because I haven't been able to produce documentation to prove that they are freeware.

Sorry for the lengthy post in a dead thread, but I just wanted to explain the great lengths I go to to ensure that everything on the site is 100% legal and doesn't violate any copyright.

[The Fifth Horseman]

The mod discussion was about that your site had a few games which we believed to be still sold or actively protected by copyright owners. As it turned out after some checking, we were the ones in the wrong.

[Dave]

Yes, we checked every single game and it's all ok
Your site is really nice and well done.

[Titan]

Nice work!
The net needs sites like ours that keep track of the decaying side of the software industry.
With everything speeding up all the time, we'll get more and more to do in the future.

[classicdosgames]

Yes, I think it's important to preserve old software, especially from the early days of personal computers. There were a lot of great computers back then, some of which are in my basement (Kaypro 4, Commodore PET, Atari 800, etc.), but the IBM PC is the only one we still use. DOS was an easy choice because 25+ years of backwards compatibility means that they can still be played on modern PCs. Windows XP will play many DOS games even without slowdown software or a SoundBlaster emulator, and projects like DOSBox will keep DOS games running into the Vista era and beyond.

Since I'm already plugging my site (if you don't mind), I also created the DOS Games Compatibility Wiki as a knowledgebase of how to get DOS games running on modern computers. There are 72 games tagged as working perfectly in Windows XP, another 47 that just need VDMSound to emulate the SoundBlaster, and the other 150+ games list whether you can use VM software (like ScummVM) or DOSBox. Since not everyone has switched to Vista yet, this is still a pretty useful resource.

[Dave]

Wow, I'm sure this could be an important resource for us
(For our compatibility forum)
Thanks for the link.