Old games again

[zuben el genub]

Play practically every game for five vintage consoles in your web browser | The Verge

Internet gods release classic video games for free | TG Daily

 

[Rukbat]

NOW I feel old. I was involved in writing some stuff for that "early delivered fetus" known as the Atari 2600. Anyone who says "sprite" where I can hear it better be talking about bubbly stuff in a can or bottle, or I'm likely to get violent.

 

[kate]

With books and movies they have to be in the public domain for Archive.org to host them - is this also true for video games, or are they excluded?

 

[PaulS]

There are sites around with,"Abandonware" games like,

The Iso Zone • Download Isos, Roms, Homebrew & Emulators for your Favourite Retro Systems!

I've downloaded a few over time like,"Return to Castle Wolfenstein" which ran fine on this low powered Lenovo S10-2


HTH

 

[Rukbat]

With books and movies they have to be in the public domain for Archive.org to host them - is this also true for video games, or are they excluded?

Published software is subject to the same laws as published reading material. So, for instance, Atari (or their successor in law, if they no longer exist) still owns the copyright to the Atari 2600 games.

But name a copyrighted movie, currently playing in theaters, that you can't download from some site (and that's a BLATANT violation of copyright).

 

[mikedt]

With books and movies they have to be in the public domain for Archive.org to host them - is this also true for video games, or are they excluded?

Video games are definitely subject to copyright. Archive.org is an on-line library or museum, they're a non-profit organisation. I believe they can host these copyrighted video games under fair use, for preservation, education, etc. You have to play them in a browser on Archive.org's website(the cloud), you can't download them from Archive.org.

 

[mikedt]

Published software is subject to the same laws as published reading material. So, for instance, Atari (or their successor in law, if they no longer exist) still owns the copyright to the Atari 2600 games.

But name a copyrighted movie, currently playing in theaters, that you can't download from some site (and that's a BLATANT violation of copyright).

Yup, which is completely illegal. Most of those sites are in places like Russia, Eastern Europe, China, where they don't care so much about copyright at all, and if one gets shut down another one pops up, whac-a-mole style. Archive.org is not like that at all. One thing it's in the United States, where they do care very much about copyright.