The latter, no illegal material here please.

lightmaster wrote:

The latter, no illegal material here please.

I tried contacting the author but got no response.

In any case, I would think that if a program is completely abandoned there wouldn't be a legal issue with trying to get a full copy.. especially if I purchased a used copy.

I bought XG-Gold in 2003 after a friend who had built his DB50XG into a box with digital output gifted me with his SW60XG, and I have very carefully kept backup copies of the program and registration codes (unlike some idiot on my QS300 group who demanded I violate the licensing conditions and accused ME of patronising him!).
Alternative editors that handle the SW60XG's QS300 voices:

Program name: XG Manager
3-4 elements: Yes
64-bit: Yes
Supported operating systems: Windows XP and upward
Author : Mark Van Den Berg
Licence : Donationware
Website: https://mountainutilities.eu/xg

Program name: SWEDIT
3-4 elements: No
64-bit: Yes
Author: Miroslav Vacura
Licence: Freeware apply patch at https://groups.io/g/QS300/files/swedit_patch.ZIP
Website: https://groups.io/g/QS300/files/SWEDIT.ZIP

Program name: XGC
3-4 elements: Yes (when opening .q3v files)
64-bit: No
Author: Jerry Jorgenrud
Licence: Freeware
Website: http://www.midiox.com/zip/xgc.zip

All I found in looking for QSedit and XG300 were broken links, and I will not be subjecting my two antivirus programs to the terrors of the Wayback Machine or the like.

cyclone3d wrote:

I would think that if a program is completely abandoned there wouldn't be a legal issue with trying to get a full copy.

That's not how copyright laws work, unfortunately.

I bought in the day a registered copy of XG-Gold. The password and the program installation came in an email. I still have the installation file(XGG-full-300.exe) and the program installed and registered on one of my old computers with WinXP.

Recently I wanted to install XG-Gold on a more actual Win(lets say 8.1....), but I have realised that I have lost the Email long ago... Achim Stulgies had curious ways to protect his creations, included the password. He used to put in it normal characters but not in the normal ASCII range, so you needed to COPY the exact text string from the email and PASTE it on the program. Then if you tried to just write the password on the program that didn't work, because the characters from the keyboard were ASCII... So it is even more hard to find my personal key.

Fortunately, I have managed successfully to copy the old entry on the WindowsXP Register to the Registry of the "new" computer. I don't know if this method is valid for the latest versions of Win, but it is worth to try it.

If somebody is interested I can put here an explanation of the process.