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For games, there is already a site working on getting old products open-sourced: liberatedgames.com. They don't update super often but they do seem to still be active.

Not much, but maybe these two links help a bit:

Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released!

Liberated Games

Great that you have asked this question, I have the same problem! I was a happy starroms.com customer very disappointed when they had to close their business. The prices for the games at Starroms were very fair and it is sad that not more gamers supported legal ROMs.

The way I am solving this for me so that I can stil sleep at night (while still being illegal):
1) I download and play the ROMs if I once owned the cartride. I did not keep all the cartridges due to lack of space but don't feel bad if I play these games today on an emulator. I made a contribution to the people who created the game.
2) If it is a game I never owned I will try to somehow purchase a product of a company that is clearly associated with the game. Preferably a collection of old games as they are available from Sega et. al.
3) If it is not possible to purchase a related product today and I really adore the original game I might try to find out who the developers were and see if I could somehow contribute to something they are doing today. Maybe they are raising funds for elderly game devs? But I have to admit that up to now I have never done this. I don't even have time for playing the new games I buy for current consoles :-(

UQM is an excellent example of classic games that ended up liberated. Check out Liberated Games for more. Command and Conquer, One Must Fall, Tribes 1&2, Simcity (micropolis), GTA 1& 2, The Elder Scrolls: Arena. All of those stand out as classics with binaries and data available.

Pretty neat remake. The remake's appearance kind of reminds me of Castle of the Winds. Which was a great RPG for Windows 3.x back in the day. Only reason I would even bother starting up Windows when I was a kid.

For TI-99 I'm still looking for a good Parsec remake. I kinda liked Munchman better than Pacman too.

Home of the Underdogs has quite a few games that are either freeware or are now free, like Freespace 2.

Liberated Games has many now free games that were once commerical offerings.

Rockstar has also made GTA2 and 2 other games free.

Liberated games has an extensive list of free, not to mention, legal games for download. There are the classics, old games and not so old games. Not abandonware, they've gone to great lengths to make sure there aren't any on the site.

This doesn't concern me personally. I have three legit store-bought copies of the game already.

But why oh why oh why did the folks at Vivendi "We put the 'Battle' in Bnetd" Universal decide to pull (well, rather, not re-arrange the redistribution) the Betrayal at Krondor from freeware? It's a wonderful game, one of the greatest RPGs ever made for PC. And there it sits, dusty, once again doomed to be "abandonware". I may sound a bit silly when babbling about the mythical Golden Era when people could download the game, legally and all, from Sierra. But it is a nice game. *sigh*

This article and the article on Joystiq it links to need LINKS to the pages themselves!

http://www.gameogre.com/: Free MMOGs
http://www.liberatedgames.com/: Free Single-player Games

Liberated Games

I'd heard that Freespace 2 had fallen into a legal hole that meant that nobody owned it, and so was legal to download. It seems unlikely to me, but does anyone know anything about it?

No, it's still under copyright, but the developers have released the source for non-commercial use. See http://www.liberatedgames.com/game.php?game_id=8. The artwork for the game is not free, so you'll still have to buy the game, or just play the demo.

...but Liberated Games has a listing of games that have had their source code released free to the public.

I've compiled Alien vs. Predator 2 from source after playing around with the AI to make aliens smarter. The really cool part is while the human and Predator characters have an AI governed by a well-defined set of propositional logic statements, the Alien code is absolute spaghetti, all procedural logic. The only way I figured this could happen is if the humanoid characters were programmed, but the Alien was evolved. I think, at the least, that releasing the source for games that were formerly closed allows development of open-source addons.

However, I've played FreeCiv as an exploration of whether it could be used in an educational setting, and it just seemed too modular and stiff. Civilization's interface, though dated, is much more interactive and slick.