Death to Old Games

D.A.Lewis · Post by **D.A.Lewis** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 10:50 am

Song to the tune of The Beverly Hillibillies

Let me tell ya story bout a ‘puter & its drive,
Only held one game or it weren’t satisfied.
Then in the future it would hold games galore,
And now I’m nothing but a big fat gaming whore.
Developer’s Tool,
Gaming fanboy,
Publisher’s Fool.
Well the last thing I do is delete the games I buy,
Cuz it hurts and its painful and it makes me wanna cry.
So my friends said see a doctor to cure all my fears,
And I said no way man, I’ll just post my story here.

I post this because I am looking at all the games on my computer. Some deserved to be there because they are unfinished and some because they are replayable. But why oh why do I have games on there that I finished and have no intention of going back to?

I remember some games I finish are so frustrating that they get deleted the moment I finished them but I haven’t been doing that lately. Sometimes I think I’ll save the game so If someone else plays the same game and gets stuck maybe I can go back and help them. Funny but that hasn’t ever happened because usually the answer is easy to recall or its easier to research the answer than pulling the old cd out.

Anywhoze, can anybody come up with a good time frame for when to send a game on your drive to byte heaven?

Archangel · Post by **Archangel** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 11:01 am

Well go after the best in the genre is one thing you can do, and old game can certainly beat a newer one there.

Another thing is if I have gone through the game on all the difficulty levels.

Classic games are often a "delete - period of time - install" thing anyway.

D.A.Lewis · Post by **D.A.Lewis** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 11:28 am

Archangel wrote:.

Classic games are often a "delete - period of time - install" thing anyway.

This might be my new manta. I recently reinstalled Might & Magic 7 and Zork Nemisis and they both ran fine. The only problem with that type of stratagy is if you wait too long, then technology might pass a game by. Like X-com which is only playable with some fixes.

Kasey Chang · Post by **Kasey Chang** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:37 pm

In that case, consider keeping a legacy machine around for those games. You can buy a 1 GHz machine with monitor for like $250, not much more than what you'd pay for a console.

D.A.Lewis · Post by **D.A.Lewis** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 1:06 pm

Another good Idea Kasey but that's a lot of desk space to be used just for the purpose of playing old games. I was however thinking something similar and came up with this idea.

Howzabout a removeable harddrive with a legacy OS. The only problem is that the older OS might not work well with "futuristic components."

Giles Habibula · Post by **Giles Habibula** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:09 pm

I have half a mind to just pull the hard drive with WinXP and Half-Life 2 on it and store it away somewhere in my closet for future use. Thus I won't have to re-install or re-activate either one 10 years from now when I'm not sure if I'll be able to at that point anymore.

Giles Habibula · Post by **Giles Habibula** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:14 pm

D.A.Lewis wrote:
Howzabout a removeable harddrive with a legacy OS. The only problem is that the older OS might not work well with "futuristic components."

True. A person could however, keep the entire old rig around assuming you have the room.

I personally am finally beginning to have a problem. With my new rig, I now have seven complete CPU boxes. Last week I tried to clean out junk from the room they were in, and found that those CPUs take up a lot of storage space. A quandrary. Give up retro-gaming for strorage space?

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:23 pm

Kasey Chang wrote:In that case, consider keeping a legacy machine around for those games. You can buy a 1 GHz machine with monitor for like $250, not much more than what you'd pay for a console.

I've got a Gateway mini-tower running Win98 for that very purpose.

I do know there was an underground movement from some OOers a few months ago to create an archive the likes of which has never been seen of DOS games. Supposedly everyting ran in a WinXP environment with DOSBOX and a few other tools.

But you didn't hear it from me. Look for a guy named "bAd mAg1c nUm6eR"

Kelric · Post by **Kelric** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:28 pm

I don't keep old games on my computer. They get un-installed once I stop playing the game and if I want to go back and play them then they just get re-installed. Rinse, wash, repeat. If they don't work with whatever computer I can scrounge up they go back on the shelf to collect dust. No big deal.

Veloxi · Post by **Veloxi** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:48 pm

I leave some games on my hard drive because I always get an itchin' to go back to 'em. Games like Master of Magic, Starflight 1 and 2, Darklands, Seven Kingdoms II, snd so on, are premanent residents.

Odin · Post by **Odin** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 12:19 am

D.A.Lewis wrote:Another good Idea Kasey but that's a lot of desk space to be used just for the purpose of playing old games. I was however thinking something similar and came up with this idea.

They make some awfully small cases (2 diff't links there) these days.

Either the Micro-ATX cases or the 1U rackmounts would take up fairly little real estate. Can't say I've ever tried to use either of those to simulate a legacy gaming PC, but it's at least theoretically feasible.

Sith