Hi,
there's lot of stuff on Archive.org but IMHO a part of the pleasure is also to search for it. I personally do not recommend to download huge packs. ( + most of the time, modified games to work with DosBBox )

Since I know where this thread is headed: We do not support so called "abandonware" here and links to so called "abandonware" sites are not allowed.

You can download games from Steam, GOG, etc and use them on older computers but you may need to modify them.

Also the "Where are you getting DOS games from?" thread has been deleted. What's next a "Where are you getting XX games from?" for every OS?

DosFreak wrote on 2020-07-18, 16:43:

We do not support so called "abandonware" here and links to so called "abandonware" sites are not allowed.

You can download games from Steam, GOG, etc and use them on older computers but you may need to modify them.

Many shareware archives exist at the links provided

My old 250 in 1 MSdos shareware game CD was a lot of fun.

For retro Windows games if you want to obtain them legally - for me it's either physical copies off eBay, or GOG.

Digital stores that push DRM can go to hell in my book.

Shareware stopped being as popular during the Windows era, although some Windows games do have playable demos.

Thanks guys for the education and guidance, off to eBay 😀

Big Box versions from eBay if possible. Back in the day when games came with maps and manuals and box art...

the majority of my Win9x games come from CompUSA and Best Buy.

Charity shops and pawn shops can have better prices then ebay sometimes.
or however you get rid of stuff in your country (markets, Garage/yard sales, gumtree, etc)

In France / Belgium :
- eBay, but it ain't cheap. The price of EVERYTHING is gouged up to eleven and beyond.
- Rakuten (called Price Minister years ago)
- LeBonCoin
- https://www.2ememain.be/
- Garage sales, friends, colleagues.
- Luck, childhood. :p

I don't get them from GOG / Steam. Most of the time, a lot is missing. CD music, DOS version, box art (obviously), french dub, you name it.
If I want a borked up release from people that do not care at all about the product and doesn't work, I'll get it for free somewhere else, thank you.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-07-19, 09:18:

I don't get them from GOG / Steam. Most of the time, a lot is missing. CD music, DOS version, box art (obviously), french dub, you name it.
If I want a borked up release from people that do not care at all about the product and doesn't work, I'll get it for free somewhere else, thank you.

I don't know about Steam, since I don't use it, but you're being unfair specifically to GOG with that statement. GOG (which stands for Good Old Games) was started by people who care very deeply about old goodies. Their packages are usually very feature-rich, include a lot of extras, such as CD audio, documentation, and yes - even box art - obviously all digitized. They try to include as much content as they can, such as multiple languages when available. Their releases are not always perfect, but they are not borked-up, plus they are guaranteed DRM free. Physical goodies aside, you are far more likely to get a working release from GOG than from any boxed copy.

I don't find that true at all. More often than not GOG's releases are butchered (DOS games missing setup programs, CD audio compressed to lossy ogg with poor track cuts) and their "work" to ensure the games run on current systems is usually nothing more than downloading whatever community provided fixes they can find rather than making any changes themselves. Last year for example when they released Diablo and Warcraft2, the games crashed on 64-bit windows due to DEP and GOG's "solution" was to turn it off for the entire system - at least until users on the forum posted some hex-edits to patch the VirtualAlloc calls, then they quietly made the same changes to their builds and pushed it as an update.

Accepting money for a game and then telling users that they need to turn off a vital security feature (that is on by default) in order to run it is ridiculous.

...and of course for the last five years or so >> https://www.tribesuniverse.com/

Thanks to Hi-Rez Studios. Unfortunately all the download links now point to archive.org which means slow downloads, but hey... they're free.

@jmarsh
I guess your experience with GOG is vastly different than my own. I never had as many problems as you describe, and I have had tried close to two dozen of their releases. Downloading community fixes, arranging and testing them is also work, and as far as I know they do have programmers that sometimes try to solve things in-house.

You do have a point that they use lossy OGG for CD audio to keep the size down, more often than not, and that is theoretically bad (because it's not lossless), but in practice it has very little effect in most cases. Poor track cuts can be an issue, but I haven't encountered it, and I don't believe it is as common as you portray it to be.

And, as I said, on a modern system, you are likely to encounter far more issues trying to run a game off a 10-15 year-old CD than trying to run GOG's releases. As someone who has spent some time buying an testing some of those oldies (just because I like physical bundles), I know that to be true.

Steam / GOG offer only a tiny portion of retro games. A lot of good old games are... NOT on Goold Old Games !

There's so much to preseve from the past decades and from all over the world.

Archive (dot org), national efforts (like the BnF in France) and other websites are worth supporting.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-07-19, 14:30:

Steam / GOG offer only a tiny portion of retro games. A lot of good old games are... NOT on Goold Old Games !

🙁

A least you can still have a good portion of games for free in the form of demos/shareware, even if the full versions are not sold and hard to come by.

It's a pity that modern commercial game developers mostly do not recognise the value of demos in preserving their products.

At first Ebay was my outlet but now it's either GOG or flea markets and etc.