Sandra Prior

Immoral Archaeology

Chances are you still own a collection of classic DOS games on your shelf, still in the cellophane and everything. What? You don't? Well, you're screwed then.

Fortunately, so-called 'abandonware' - old games that are supposedly legal to download for free - is astonishingly easy to come by on the internet. However, in most cases a given game hasn't been signed off as abandoned by its creator, it's simply that its creator hasn't been/can't be contacted for permission.

Just a couple of years ago you could turn up pretty much anything with the slightest spot of Googling, but publishers are getting increasingly vicious about 'protecting' their old games of late. In many cases, those publishers don't exist anymore, which leaves a vast number of games in copyright limbo. They aren't legally abandonware, but you're arguably not impacting anyone's income by downloading them. The moral choice is yours. Just remember that 'it said abandonware on the website' wouldn't constitute a valid legal excuse.

What you are safe with is commercial games that have been released for free. Wikipedia keeps a vast list of these at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of commercial games released as freeware, which constitutes more hours than you could count of happy cost-free gaming.

The third option is eBay and similar. While there's a gradual creep in the values of rarer or more treasured games, you can turn up a working copy of most titles for an easy $10, and a good-nick boxed copy for around the $30 mark. There's a vague sense that collector mania could hit vintage PC gaming any day now and these prices will go crazy so now's the time to get bidding if you do fancy owning your own classics archive. In fact, it's when you do own a game, especially when it's on nearly-obsolete media like floppy disks, or you don't want to peel off the cellophane, that grabbing a download from an abandonware site makes the most sense.

If the PC's back catalogue isn't enough, presumably you've got that beady eye of yours on Marios and Zeldas and Sonics and Tekkens and what-have-you. And fair enough - one of the PC's many strengths is its adaptability, and that includes near-perfect emulation of most consoles up to and including the Playstation and N64. Because emulation involves the PC pretending to be other, often dramatically different, hardware, it's generally nowhere near as efficient as running a game designed to run in Windows natively. So, you're not gonna be playing Xbox 360 games on your Core 2 Duo, but older consoles have such weeny needs that they’ll barely trouble a modern system. Decide which system you want to recreate, and a simple search will turn up an emulator program for it.

Unfortunately, as with most abandonware, it's illegal to play the data ripped from a console game and into a file (usually known as a ROM) unless you own the original cartridge/disc/tape/ arcade machine, or its creator has specifically released it for free. This doesn't stop Googling from offering untold ROM bounties, but remember there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's a veritable horde of emulation sites on the web, and most of them will try to trick you into handing out your email address or will trap you in an infinite loop of pop-ups.

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