Terminally Incoherent

Utterly random, incoherent and disjointed rants and ramblings...

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Don't you just love the classics?

They don't make the games like the way they used to in the past... Remember all these awesome games from the way back? I was especially fond of the point & click adventure games. They don't seem to make many of these lately, don't they?

I mentioned this website before, but I really think the Scummvm project is worth mentioning. Scummvm team wrote an emulator engine which seeks to resurect old LucasArts classics such as Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Islad, Sam & Max and etc... And the best part is that scummvm engine allows you to play these old DOS/Windows classics under linux!

So far the software supports maybe 20 odd games which use the LucasArts SCUMM engine, as well as few other popular non LucasArts games like Simon the Sorcerer. The work is still in progress and new games are frequently added in. I must say this is one of the best emulators for old games I have seen in a while - it integrates with the games engine seemlesly and works like a dream. And it is also great in windows environment, allowing you to run the old dos based games on systems with winXP which do not have real DOS backbone.

Also, scummvm comes with two awesome games which were open sourced by their authors especially for this project: Beneth a Steal Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both are excelent adventure games, and alot of fun to play. They are avaliable from the scummvm website...

Of course sometimes you would also like to play other old games - for that there is another solution: DosBox. This is also a multi-platform solution that allows you to use old DOS based software in non DOS environment - be it XP or MDK :) It's not as smooth as scummvm and sometimes you need to tweek the CPU cycles and Frameskip rate to prevent the game from crawling at a less than satisfactory speed - but, most importantly it works :)

You might ask where to do I get these old games. Well, for me the best place is Underdogs website. Probably the biggest collection of abandonware and freeware games in existence. Happy hunting...

Btw - not all old games are abandonware. Simon, Samd & Max and Tentacle for example are still copyrighted and freely distributed version are considered WAREZ not Abandonware. underdogs dont have any warez, but other sites do so check before you download :)

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