for me, abandonware is like this. I buy a can of soup in the store. I
eat the soup out of it. Then for a few more years I use the empty soup
can to store various things. It's not abandoned I'm still using it and I
would not like it if you steal it. But now later I'm done with the soup
can and so I throw it out and put it out for the trash guy. But before
the trash truck comes to take it someone walks bye and says hey, an old
empty soup can and its right on top of the other garbage, I think I'll
take it wash it ans use it. It's been thrown out so he must not care
about it. So person2 takes it and puts it to their own uses. But no
matter what person2 does he cannot put soup in it seal it back up and
resell it. To do that he would have to work for the manufacturer. And if
person2 did take it to the original company they may say sorry we can't
take this, this can is nicked and scratched and dented up and is not up
to our quality standard anymore. Here, take it back use it for your own
personal use only, it is no longer fit to be used commercially. And then
you say hey some of my friends need some storeage containers. So you
pull out your replicator machine and replicate some more coppies of the
dented scratched up old soup can. And your friends or person2's friends
say hey thanks for the old dented cans. I can use these to store some
coins and loose change. It's abandonware, no longer fit for commercial
use. And so I think this analogy should also fit the abandonware as well.
follow me on twitter @joshknnd1982 or facebook email joshknnd1...@gmail.com
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On 1/8/2015 1:46 AM, shaun everiss wrote:
for me drone and braminar are games I play on a regular basus and
wasteland rebbels.
but what are the licences of half this stuff more over even if you
have to buy them do the authors and ways to get them exist.
I know agt has some sort of game runner though I'd like a way to run
agt games in a windows something text is good but audio maybe for some
of the dos games who knows.
And there is the licence for said thing.
richard disteno has done all his games for dos into windows ones
mostly text console apps with sound where needed.
So yes it can be done.
However tom I think dosbox should be made accessable somehow, as a lot
of dos games now are using that system and I see no reason why we
can't do the same thing if we so need to.
the issue is that dos screenreader and external synths are hard to
come buy, well external synths actually.
At 12:00 p.m. 8/01/2015, you wrote:
Hello everyone,
Over the last couple of weeks there has been a bit of discussion on
the best way to preserve and play some of our favorite Dos games.
Solutions have ranged from finding a way to make Dosbox and other Dos
emulators accessible to actually running MS Dos in a virtual machine
with varying degrees of success. While all of those solutions have
some merit I don't feel they truly address the problem of preserving
those games and applications for the majority of VI gamers, because
they are problematic at best and are not simple solutions to the
problem.
Ideally a solution wouldn't involve installing and configuring lots of
extra software like emulators or virtual machines. I feel pretty
confident in saying the average VI gamer would just rather install and
play it no extra dependencies required. Therefore if we are going to
truly preserve these games for the average user we need to look
elsewhere other than emulators and virtual machines. What I mean by
that is by getting together a handful of interested developers to
rewrite most of these games for modern platforms.
It isn't as complicated or as much of an undertaking as it sounds. A
lot of these games we are talking about are text only and as long as a
developer intends to rewrite it as a text based game he or she can
rapidly rewrite the game since they aren't worried about all the extra
overhead that would go into an audio game or a video game. By and
large text applications and games are pretty simple, and don't take a
great deal of time to create. Especially, if they use the right tools
and languages for the job.
Back in the 80's and 90's when a lot of these text games were written
they would have been written in C or C++. That is fine, but there are
simpler solutions now. One such solution is Python which is a
high-level scripting language well suited to quick and dirty text
applications and games such as we are discussing. I can see an
interested developer rewriting some of these Dos games in Python,
compiling them, and releasing them in a fairly short amount of time
barring other commitments of course.
I feel rewriting these games is the best of all possibilities because
it resolves all the problems with playing the originals. First, since
the games will be rewritten from scratch they will be compiled for
32-bit and 64-bit operating systems thus negating the requirement for
a 16-bit environment to run them. Second, they can be released as open
source so that future generations of gamers can take the source make
new builds if and when needed. Third, they can be redesigned and
ported to multiple platforms meaning that instead of just being
strictly a Windows game they can be compiled and run on Mac, Linux,
etc. Finally, they are games that a blind and a sighted gamer can
truly play together. While there will always be disparities between a
blind and sighted gamer playing a video game or an audio game, but
they would be equal in playing text based games. So I see this as
being a distinct advantage of having a common user interface like
text.
In any case I happen to have some free time coming up, and I was
wondering if anyone is interested in this project. If so what Dos
games would be foremost on your wish list and why?
Cheers!
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