John
(he/him)
Growing up in the 1980's, we had an Apple IIe that my mom was able to borrow (and eventually buy) from the school where she taught, which was my intro to computing. I grew up playing with boot disks, green monochrome monitors, and shady software from computer fairs. Walking into a Babbages or Software Etc meant carefully looking at the packaging for games, because so many of the cool titles were only on Commodore 64/128, or the dreaded IBM/PC Compatible. It got worse in the 90's, when my mom upgraded to a Macintosh, and the games sections available for me in those stores shrank even more. I was still fascinated by the breadth of the types of games that I would never play.
Other people have nostalgia for these titles, as well as the know-how of configuring DOSBox and other front-ends. One person goes by the handle eXo, and they run a community that releases compilations of all DOS games that they have come across. Not just a typical abandonware project, this group has not only configured each game's frontend settings to work out of the box, but they've included title screens/screenshots, box and manual scans, and other ancillary material like full magazine scans from the time period. It's extremely slick, and they have over 7200 titles currently supported in their V5 release.
In addition, they also have collections for Windows 3.x titles, and SCUMMVM specific games. None of these game collections are small, so beware if you have a metered data connection or limited hard drive space. The DOS collection does have a "lite" version that downloads games on demand and cuts out some of the ancillary material, but it still weighs in at 52GB without any installed games.
This is also a potential legal gray area, since some of the games in this giant collection are currently offered for sale on other various platforms. I encourage people to still buy the games that are available, but dabble around with all the other unavailable stuff in these collections.
eXoDOS version 5
eXoWin3x
eXoScummVM
Other people have nostalgia for these titles, as well as the know-how of configuring DOSBox and other front-ends. One person goes by the handle eXo, and they run a community that releases compilations of all DOS games that they have come across. Not just a typical abandonware project, this group has not only configured each game's frontend settings to work out of the box, but they've included title screens/screenshots, box and manual scans, and other ancillary material like full magazine scans from the time period. It's extremely slick, and they have over 7200 titles currently supported in their V5 release.
In addition, they also have collections for Windows 3.x titles, and SCUMMVM specific games. None of these game collections are small, so beware if you have a metered data connection or limited hard drive space. The DOS collection does have a "lite" version that downloads games on demand and cuts out some of the ancillary material, but it still weighs in at 52GB without any installed games.
This is also a potential legal gray area, since some of the games in this giant collection are currently offered for sale on other various platforms. I encourage people to still buy the games that are available, but dabble around with all the other unavailable stuff in these collections.
eXoDOS version 5
eXoWin3x
eXoScummVM