Old Games for Old Timers

Do you enjoy obscure games from decades ago? Games that is qurky and with terrible graphics but you get nostalgic none-the-less? Then here is a nice website for you - Home of the Underdogs. They host information or actual copies of discontinued computer games for you to relive the good old days.

I am ashamed to admit I like a really old and crappy pc game called "Magic the Gathering" that used to run on my windows95. Well, the game is no more - mainly due to buggy programming and terrible implimentation. There is no explaining why I like the things I do. But Underdogs took the pain to port the game into Windows XP and modify the game speed to cope with the fast modern processor.

They took the original game "magic the gathering" and bundled it with the sequel "duels of the planeswalker" and add-on "spell of the acient" then included "mana-link". The download is 78mb. There is also an unoffical patch of v1.32. You can find all that here.

Simple instructions for getting it installed and working: Extract that somewhere, run 'setup.bat', wait for it to finish, then move it all to c:\magic\Program, double-click magic.reg to make sure it gets into the registry (setup.bat tries to do it but might not succeed or something), then download the unofficial 1.3.2 manalink patch (from the link on that page), and install that (It expects MTG to be in c:\magic\Program). After that's all done, you can move it where-ever you want, and just run magic.exe to run it."

This worked a treat and even solves the CPU speed issues. This game still rocks!

Important tips are: 1.After doing ALL the above run the game exe's in Windows2000 compatablity mode 2.Use Y/N to buy cards in town 3.If when switching between areas you find yourself with a blank screen simply left click once and the graphics pop right up.

-source from ntcompatible

They even have a link show casing all the great old games hosted, aptly named as "Hall of Belated Fame".

Another game I enjoy from decade past is Marathon, made by Bungie. Now the company is better known as the producer of Halo. But back in the days, they started their career on Macontosh and the Marathon Trilogy is what first put bread and fame on their table.

Bungie is an amazing company. After the trilogy became obsolete due to time, they released the code and executable so fans can tinker with the game. The result is a free trip down the memory lane. The old game has been modified and will run on Windows XP or Mac. The files are hosted by Bungie themselves - Trilogy Release. The trilogy release link covers the second and third game, namely Marathon 2 and Infinity. The first game is so old that it takes slightly more to make it work, but some dedicated fan went through the trouble so you can play this awesome 1994 game. Code name M1A1, this lets you play the original Marathon on Windows. I am not sure where to find the Mac version but there should be a version for Mac somewhere. I don't own Apple computer so I didn't look very hard.

Lately I have been thinking about getting a notebook computer. So far with very little research I am leaning towards Dell Inspiron or Apple Notebook (PowerMac?). I seem to enjoy thinking about buying something and researching on it more than the actual purchase. I will just keep talking about wanting to buy laptop on and off for the next couple months - it gives me something to do.

If you enjoy modern graphic. A project Marathon Ressurection ported the game with Unreal Tournment engine.

If you are interested in the background and story. Here is a comprehesive archive of every terminal shown in the game with text.

There are other ways to play old games - namely by using emulators. There are NES (nintendo) emulator, SNES (super nintendo) emulator, dreamcast, psx (playstation), sega cd, sega genesis, MEME (arcade) and more. Just do some search on the internet. Almost any game produced a decade ago can be found for free. Which is lucky for someone who doesn't care about graphic or 3D environment - like me.