Abandonware RPGs

Remove all ads!

Recently saw an article on 'Abandonware' games. Does anyone know where to find these said games and if any decent (Quite apt I think) games have been abandoned?

 

http://www.abandonia.com/

Knock yourself out

I admit I haven't played half the RPGs on there yet but there are a fair few D&D ones if I remember rightly. Worth a shot, they're free and usually only a few meg.

 

Eh, depends on what site you've found. There are a few gems, though - I think the first Lands of Lore is abandonware now, possibly the first Dune (which was at least part RPG) and some classics like the Eye of the Beholder series, Al Qadim, and a few others.

 

I strongly recommend Ultima V, VI, and VII (Part I and II). Ultima: Savage Empire and Martian Dreams are outstanding (Martian Dreams is one of favorite games of all time). Menzoberranzan was very good as well.

Other recommended from the rpg list on 8's site: Genie's Curse, Wizardry VII, Megatraveler 2, Betrayal at Krondor, and the Eye of the Beholder Games. If you don't mind really terrible graphics the Krynn games are okay, as are the Buck Rogers games (same game engine for both).

 

Have you played this one on a modern system? I've been trying to get my copy to work for quite some time, and I can't even run this one with DosBox.

 

Huh, I thought dosbox makes it work. Wasn't it one of the SSI titles?

---------- Added 0 hours, 1 minutes and 20 seconds later... ----------

Wasn't Menzoberranzan one of the SSI games? It should run on Dosbox.

 

No I haven't tried it in years -- have you tried using Moslo?

 

The problems I've had were usually driver-oriented. I should probably try upgrading dosbox.

 

I've recently downloaded and started a run through Ultima: Underworld. Still ground-breaking, still fun (if a bit tedious and clumsy with the controls). Such fond memories of that game. I used to have the CD's, but lost them some time ago.

 

Darklands, anyone? Excellent semi-historical rpg. Too bad the combat/indoors system was horrible, but the rest was just great. I liked the non-linearity and the lack of main quest: you could just roam the German lands and gather experience and wealth . The skill system had some nice ideas: in the low skill levels a character could learn something if he failed to do the task in hand. A skilled swordman could scare off bandits with a flashy weapon routine..which was nice, because the combat system was, as said, awful.

 

Absolute genius thank you, I'll be checking them out shortly

 

My brother pulled off Menzo on a "modern" system (PIV gen Celeron or older). I recommend Dune, yeah. Might & Magic series is not exactly abandonware, but if you find it at all in retail, then it's dirt cheap.

 

Started Dune yesterday. I had it on my Amiga and loved it but never finished it. Now I am trying to but keeping track of all fremen and what they are doing and where they are going, jeez.

 

Check out HOTU (Home of the underdogs)
This site was down for ages but its recently been re-launched, there are thousands of abandonware games on there, I personally would check out
System Shock 2 for an RPG with a bit of an action slant to it.

 

Oh wow! Thanks for pointing out HOTU's back up! I was heartbroken forever when it went down. You just made my life!

 

Betrayal at Krondor was my favorite, i think. the combat system was excelent, and more than a little addictive.

 

I should probably start a new thread, but how did he do that? I couldn't get it to work on my 933mhz Win98SE system. According to Microsoft's site it needs to run in MS-DOS mode, but I couldn't get sound to work after restarting in MS-DOS mode and it ran too fast. There was something else not working right but I haven't tried in many years.

I actually have a legit copy from the Forgotten Realms Silver Edition, even if it was passed to me by a family member who said "If you can get it to play on your computer, you can keep it." He couldn't get any of the games to work on his modern computers and no longer had the old ones in working condition.

 

I think Menzo should run in a regular DOS window form within Win98SE. It's a DOS game but it doesn't do anything fancy with memory management like, say, Ultima VII. If you're going to restart in DOS mode you need to make sure your sound card has DOS drivers, that they were loaded in your autoexec.bat, and that the BLASTER environmental variable is set properly (it's a line in your autoexec.bat that starts with "set blaster=" then has different values for IRQ, DMA channel and so on, depending on your sound card and its settings).

Frankly the best way by far is to run the game in DOSBox. I've played the entire game that way and it does work, plus this is the best way to solve the speed problem. If for any reason you cannot get it to work in DOSBox let me know and I can always send you my configuration file, which I know for sure runs the game.