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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

The home-computer world is especially interesting for old games. If something made it to a Nintendo or Sega console, it's probably very well-preserved, but I'd be surprised if even 1% of all video games made were released on consoles.

There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".

I honestly kind of think that Abandonware should be codified into law in the same way that trademarks are; if you're not actively giving me a legitimate way to buy your game then I don't think it should be illegal for me to get it illegitimately.

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There's a book of BASIC software I have. I'd like to publish the programs online. I've tried to contact the author, but he's dead. I tried to contact the publisher, but they were acquired. I tried to contact the acquiring publisher, but they went out of business 20 years ago. The trail is cold there, and I imagine it's nearly impossible to figure out who owns the rights now.

Archive.org is full of copyrighted software without known authors. I know it because i'v found a lot of Pocket PC & Palm software from studios/companies that don't even exist anymore.

It's not ideal but it's better than losing it.

Those are either "flotsam" or "derelict", definitively not "pirated".

Upvoted for use of the correct terms from marine law. Nice.

Someone else mentioned archive.org, check to see if they have a copy of it already - if not, you can always send it to them. They've got a full archival copy of all Nintendo 64 games (and others) so they seem to have some kind of legal protections / exemptions.

They're relying on the DMCA liability shield by allowing user uploaded files and removing them upon request by a the copyright holder - and then someone else uploads the same file.

At that point, I'd publish them: nobody's going to come after you, either.

Publish first and ask for forgiveness later

what's the title/author or some other identifying info?

"Methods of Orbit Determination for the Microcomputer" by Dan Boulet.

I think I found a PDF scan once, though even with OCR it wasn't exactly copy-pastable into a BASIC interpreter. I'd like to clean up the programs and put them on github, or something. Might end up just re-implement the algorithms (which are explained in the book), because there's no copyright on algorithms.

There are projects like eXoDOS that are attempting to provide a complete DOS archive. They are currently at version 6 that weighs in at just under 700GB. But they seem to be finding new stuff all the time, thus the versioning of the archive.

I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.

I would like to take this opportunity to pitch an old favourite of mine - Blast Doors (1996) by Freds Friends. Aka "The Nuclear Family Feud". Basically it's a 3D version of Artillery with some elevation physics, and a fun theme around nuclear weapons being fully legalized for home defence. So you're a bunch of grouchy neighbours in your mobile nuclear bunkers, firing off various warheads at eachother and saying quippy 90s things. It has a very distinct style and wry, absurdist sense of humor - and for a long time was available on the website of one of the developers (which was also delightfully 90s).

Fred Haslam was apparently also at Maxis and worked on Sim City 2000.

If you're reading this Fred, I loved Blast Doors and love it still. https://archive.org/details/BLASTSE2_ZIP

Nevermind the Commodore etc. who are preserved as abandonware. Remember FLASH games? They are mostly gone already. Even if you still have a copy, they can't be run anymore. There were some efforts made, but last I checked plenty of FLASH games still didn't work flawlessly.

Flashpoint Archive now has around 200K flash games that can be downloaded and ran locally. Im sure this is nothing compared to what used to exist but basically anything of note is in there

What do you use to run them locally? FLASH doesn't exist anymore and all the emulators do not properly work. I've got an archive of FLASH games myself, but I cannot play them anymore.

Flash Player in the browser doesn't exist anymore. There's still the standalone Flash Player that game with Adobe Flash/Animate, and it works fine. It doesn't depend on browser compatibility, since it runs on its own.

Not a thing on Linux as far as I know, unfortunately.

A Flash game I made a million years ago actually works in Ruffle now. It's really quite bad so I don't really want to prominently display it on my blog, but I might hide it somewhere as easter egg.

Ruffle is getting good enough where I think we might be properly archive all the Flash stuff.

I end up being drawn into and wasting time on a flash video site [1] at least once a year and there's always at least a bunch of animations not working properly. But it has gotten better over the years.

[1] https://z0r.de/7194

> There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".

Mostly unrelated but if you are looking for this "effervescence" in modern times, don't hesitate to take a look at Pico8 games and Ich.io.

On Pico 8, everything is free (except the one time pico 8 licence).

On Itch.io I bought a ridiculous 400 games pack for a few dollars a few years back.

You have to dig a little but I found more gems in both those libraries than I expected.

It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).

>unfathomable number of games that were released

One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.

At some point we have to accept that it's not possible to preserve all history, and be content with a sample.

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