I have every patch Ive ever downloaded from the internet
burned onto cd/dvd and cunningly all labelled backup (date) so I know the exact contents at a glance 🙁

You have a lot of stuff Davros, including hundreds of cover discs IIRC. Wish it could all be put online somewhere.

https://www.patches-scrolls.de/ or its archived older version, https://www.patches-scrolls.com/

patches-scrolls.de as I mentioned is not having a lot of US patches so not very useful anymore, seems they are removing content. I'll check .com and see what is there.

Been able to dig up a lot on archive.org but the patches dir of cdrom.com seems to be missing, as well as the 3drealms and idstuff dirs (mirrors are missing a lot of the older stuff).

I've been able to use guuguu to find stuff on Gamefront but only if I know the name of the patch, their internal search is pretty useless.

What about the older archive, https://www.patches-scrolls.com ? It is as claimed to be no longer maintained, but that may well mean it is not deleting things, also.

Do most modern PC game patches still come out as standalone programs? Thanks to GOG and Steam's automatic patching and making the latest version of the game downloadable, it seems possible that some companies might not bother making standalone patches, if the game is digital download only (it's been eons since I or anyone I know bought a physical PC game) and the downloaders handle the patching process somehow.

I'll check the scrolls.com but it usually links to the other site.

I'm not re-buying thousands of games I have hard copies of, and frankly steam and GoG versions are often broken and I wouldn't want them anyways, you might not know it but they often use scene no-cd exes and can have bugs the original games do not, especially on protected titles. Not to mention all the ones which are simply not available.

Doesn't Patches-Scrolls modify patches to slip in self-promoting .urls?

leileilol wrote:

Doesn't Patches-Scrolls modify patches to slip in self-promoting .urls?

Another reason to use the .com archive site.

For Sierra patches I grabbed most of the contents of their FTP when it still existed. Unfortunately I did not save much in terms of the localized or non-PC patches.

As for LA patches there was a link here a few years back to the entire LA FTP someone saved, though it may have been a torrent link.

LA patches?

And yeah I don't want modified stuff, too hard to keep track of that. Also a pretty lame thing to do honestly...

I found some of the Links stuff on various websites since they are gone from Microsoft.

It is a shame that a lot of early gaming history is being lost, should organize a better collective to help preserve it in legit easy to access places.

RoyBatty wrote:

LA patches?

Found it -- LucasArts Patches.

https://archive.org/details/ftp.lucasarts.com-20130427

I don't think that Patches-Scrolls modifies the patches, just the links make you jump through hoops with ad popups, etc. before you can get to the actual download. The .com does not do this. At least not to the extreme degree that the .de site does.

Like I noted, I saved much of the Sierra FTP, but it would be nice to have some effort to the preservation of other companies' patches. Perhaps in some format as VOGONS drivers or a Wiki? Something that others could contribute to help build and preserve.

Video Game Preservation Collective is working on it, got some guys that are quite good a finding stuff and also digging through archive.org and pulling out the files from their backups, I'm not sure where it could be hosted though, it would be a lot of work to upload it somewhere only to have the site disappear like so many others. I mean there's nexus, but I don't know how they would react to it, although I have asked the site owner about it before and he doesn't have a problem with it. I guess the problem is with old mods that don't have any readme or whatever to say you can spread them like doom wads do.

There's a Russian website that is a pretty reliable source of patches for everything up until 2012: https://ag.ru/. Search for the game you need using the bar at the top then select "патчи" and it should be obvious from there.

I would be reluctant to download binaries from a Russian site.

collector wrote:

I would be reluctant to download binaries from a Russian site.

No, Ru-Net is not full of malware, who told you that? This is a really old website about video games, it was created back in the 90's. I've been using it for years, it's safe.

gamecopyworld.com and gameburnworld.com
most of the game since 2000 and onwards...