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What (And Where) Are The Classic Free Games?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm flying from the US to Europe in a few weeks and am taking my iBook along for the ride. With a seven hour flight looming, I'm wanting to take some games along to play. But I don't want to download a bunch of freeware that may or may not be junk; I just want the classics. What are the classic free games? I've already downloaded Nethack and am looking into Freeciv. What else is there? I need something that's multiplatform (or at least has a Mac port), something that's stable and has stood the test of time, and something that is more complex and engrossing than a Tetris clone. Thanks!"
http://www.angband.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
many variants to play with, all take a good long while to complete. Think of 'em as nethack extended.
Personal favortites are pernband & cthangband, psiband isn't bad either.
MAME
Is that possible? I'm having a hard time taking a break to even write this. I've been playing Tetris for the past 10 years with very few breaks for eating, sleeping, etc. Gotta go! Straight line block coming!
I haven't used a Mac in a while, but there were some cool shareware games out.
Off the top of my head, some great games were Lode Runner, Beam Wars, Hazardous, Taskmaker, Tetris, and a few more I can't remember the names of. Check for one of those shareware CD-ROMS they used to sell and the ones listed in bold are probably going to be pretty good.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Why not install MAME and borrow some roms?
The classics are everywhere.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
This place has thousands of mac games. Some are shareware, but most are abandon ware.
.
Mac Gamer
SNOOD!
"Bold as Love"
One place that I find to be quite reliable for finding old games is
http://www.freeoldies.com
(And yes, I know, it does sound like a porn site)
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
Escape Velocity. The original runs perfectly on a 3400, as does EV: Override. EV:Nova, the lattest version, is supposedly great. Really, no shareware game compares to these three gems from Ambrosia. They have a 30 day trial period with a popup at startup being the only real annoyance.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
The Incredible Machine (TIM)
Bridge Builder 1 and 2 (from Pontifex)
Other great games are:
Blockout
Sokoban
UGH!
At least, these are the only games which I am still not bored.
Gamespy site with classic ROMs and emulators.
Some old DOS games.
More recent games at Kev's Classing Gaming.
The last time I loaded up nethack on my Mac, I was stuck in front of the computer for about 30 hours straight.
If you can't get through an eight hour flight with that, you've got bigger problems than finding free games...
Master of Orion II!
Maelstom is classic Mac game, now ported using SDL to many platforms and released under the GPL.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Nearly every platform has an interpreter for the old Infocom text games. Zork I, II, and III are available for free legally from ActiVision,
and once you have a z-machine interpreter for your Mac, you can use any of the other Infocom games you can find. There are also many (legal) free z-machine games available on the net, and I think that Activision recently sold a CD-ROM with most of the old Infocom collection, including Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, and the others.
Any one of these will keep you busy for the whole flight and taxi ride to your hotel, and you'll probably stay up and keep playing once you get there instead of sleeping off the jet lag. Just remember to bring a pad of paper, pencil, and eraser for drawing maps and working out mazes.
Frozen Bubble. Is that game ever addictive. The music is a bit repetitive but very fitting. And the cute little noises it makes when you shoot the little spheres.. delightful. An easy way to kill a few hours. It's Perl/SDL so I'm sure you could compile it on OS X.
"Caffeine is not an option. Caffeine is a way of life."
My roommates and I, in the end-of-summer boredom lurch, just set up a computer running MS-DOS 6.22 just to play the old games! Man, back in the day...
Anyway, I'm only 21, so I never did much with dos, so despite what I think I know about "computers" and windows or other microsoft products, etc, I know exactly crap about EMS and XMS and EMM386 and HIMEM and SMARTDRV. We've run into problems with wing commander running at the speed of light because it counts clock cycles, not seconds, and with some games not liking the fact that the machine has 160 megs of ram. One of the games suggested we make $ExtraRam sized cache with smartdrv so the game thought we had less memory, except instead of $ExtraRam being 5,341 KB, it was 157,325,210 KB...
But anyway, here's my list of games I have installed:
Doom 2
Mechwarrior 2
Wing Commander
Wing Commander II
Wing Commander III
Privateer
Jazz Jackrabbit
Rise of the Triad
Duke Nukem I
Duke Nukem II
Duke Nukem 3D
Warcraft I
Command and Conquer
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
I don't know how many of these have mac ports - Doom2 did, I use to own it...
I also didn't know that windows 3.1 wasn't an operating system. That bugged me - when you install windows, it doesn't install any OS files, just the interface to dos... Despite saying "Windows Operating System" on the floppies.
~Will
sig?
With all of the Sept 11th "security measures" I would recommend that you have your laptop ready to turn on just in case at the airport terminal. Also, they will ask you take your machine out of its case and then they'll pass it through their x-ray machines. Make sure you don't have it stuffed at the bottom of your carry-ons. I don't know how good your battery life is, or what class you will be flying but if you are going in economy make sure you bring at least two batteries. If you are in first or business class, you can always buy their on-board power cords that hook up into the plane (depending on airline). As for games, I would suggest the old simcity, tetris, pinball, etc. You don't want some massively 3d game sucking up your battery power. Also, I don't know what kind of rechargers come with your laptop but be ready for an inevitable bump in line voltage in europe (220v). And, you can save your on-board modem some trouble by buying a line testing kit/adapter. This saved me from frying my modem on a trip to Saudi many years ago (their teleco line voltage is much more than it is here).
Or a Game Boy Advance? For use on an airplane, laptops have the following problems:
1.) Size: It's not comfy to use a laptop actively on an airplane. Either you have to rest it on your lap (horrible ergonomics), or the guy in front of you will lay his seat back and make you panic for a mo.
2.) Battery life: I realize Macs are efficient and all, but it IS an issue. With a GBA, just bring an extra set of batteries. You shouldn't need more than 4 AA's total on your trip. (Psst tip: Don't bring more than 4 AA's on an airplane trip. I did that on a trip recently and one of the security personell mentioned that looked supsicious and recommended I carry no more than 4.
3.) Startup/shutdown time: May not seem like much, but there's a big difference between 60 seconds of bootup or shutdown, and 'click' your GBA is off.
4.) Control: Control is horrible on a laptop for most games. If the ergonomics don't get you, the lack of space for a mouse to move will.
5.) Carry on: I find it to be a nuisance to unpack and put away a laptop on a plane. I can imagine most people who've tried this have the same sentiment. Not like a GBA where you just slip it in your pocket.
I know my suggestion doesn't meet all your requirements. I thought I'd mention it though because I had a similar problem myself a couple of months ago. Despite the fact that I have a teeny weeny laptop, I came to the conclusion that a GBA with a couple of games and a couple of Douglas Adams books were far more suitable and comfortable than a laptop. My laptop didn't turn into an interesting game machine until I got to the hotel. The nice thing about a GBA is that it plays nearly all GB games (dirt cheap), it's efficient with batteries, and it's form factor is quite suitable for a plane.
"Derp de derp."
This game is hot, fast, and FREE!
they elected instead to remove them all (well, almost, Robby Roto (I think) and two other 'legal' ROMs are still available) thinking that since they were contacted by one, likely they'd be contacted by more.
Sorry, but that's just stupid. Most of the manufacturers knowingly did NOT take legal action. They could have just taken down the couple that were in question, and moved on. If they got a flood of legal activity, they could have delt with it then.
The second reason, I suspect, is because of the massive bandwidth requirements to serve all those ROMs. They operated almost soley on donations. I contributed what I could, when I could.
Now that's a reason I could have respected. If they didn't have the money to support it, then just say so, but don't give us a cock-and-bull story about "one mfg complained, therefore we have to take the WHOLE DAMN THING DOWN" which just doesn't ring true.
Can you say the same?
As a matter of fact I did, so take your take your nose in the air elsewhere.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The classic space game, Elite.
There's a portable version at www.newkind.co.uk if your platform can run Allegro (don't worry about Allegro barfing during the build on the x86 assembler bits - they are't actually required for things like X. I've got Allegro working happily on my Sun.) Elite: The New Kind runs happily on Solaris, Linux, Windoze and anything that's supported by Allegro.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I suspect you'd get even more odd looks if you were playing a flight sim.
Way back when me and a buddy always carried a 50 foot coax cable when we traveled. We'd deathmatch at 30,000 feet even when we weren't sitting side by side.
Nobody ever complained.
Here's where you go to download those golden oldies, including classic games
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Softwar
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !