playing old pc games for free

[ubelaffe]

so, I recently got excited remembering playing the old Gabriel Knight "The Beast Within" on my first computer. I don't have a pc anymore, don't know if I still have the pc copy of the game anyway, and really don't want to pay for either a pc or a mac version of the game. Also not sure if the new os's would support stuff like that anymore. I had problems in the past with xp not liking 98 and prior stuff. Anyone know of anything being done to resurrect old classic pc titles? Is this a simple case of finding a torrent and doing it that way?

[gravitone]

There is a lot of software out there that wont run on a modern day windows version for various reasons. Playing a lot of these games means digging up older hardware + a copy of windows 95/98 to play on. Dosbox is great for legacy games upto the early pentium era, but everything after that is not emulated yet, and if it would be, would be too slow to be playable anyways at this point in time.

If you have some time, and some space available, gather up some old hardware and build a system for older titles. You can build the ultimate 1999 PC for next to nothing these days.

[Ziggy]

Or just run a virtual PC with Windows 98SE (or whatever). Works perfectly.

[Hatta]

The Beast Within is a dos game, so Dosbox is your best bet. Apparently the windows version works fine under Wine, so if you have a Linux box handy you might go that route.

[t0yrobo]

Dosbox is gret for dos programs, and there are many games for win 95/98 to run on xp. Not all games have that though, running 95 in virtualbox would be a real good idea.

[Hatta]

I've tried 95 in virtualbox. There are no guest additions, so it's really, really slow. I dunno if VMWare would be any better.

It's also worth pointing out that Win 3.1 runs fine in Dosbox. I've played a few games that way that gave me trouble otherwise. Dosbox is slowly getting to the point where Win 95 is viable on it. So there's hope there.

[J T]

Abandonia hosts abandoned videogames.
www.abandonia.com

GOG ("Good Old Games") sells old games for modern systems on the cheap.
www.gog.com

[Hobie-wan]

Just to throw this out there... Slave Zero for PC didn't work out of the box on XP. However the only reason was because the Safedisc protection on the game didn't like XP or W2K. They didn't even feel like updating it with a patch.

If you used a NoCD patch, the game ran fine. And yes I was playing a boxed copy in my possession. Just something to try to get older games cooperating on XP and perhaps Vista.

[ubelaffe]

any of this going to work on mac leopard? I didn't stipulate that earlier, but that would be the best option for me.

how cumbersome are dosbox and the others?

[J T]

More free games than you could possibly have time to play:

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3109554

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3137482

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3148013

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.off ... Id=3156339

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3165201

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3174065

http://www.gamesradar.com/f/365-days-of ... 4293190000