Where to find old games and software
Stores⌗
If you can find your title here, look no further.
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GOG: The Good Old Games (GOG) is a digital distribution platform with a curated selection of games, a “you buy it, you own it” philosophy, and vast selection of classic game titles for Windows, Mac & Linux, DRM-free.
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Steam: the biggest video game digital distribution service around.
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EBay: here you can find almost anything available on real physical media, price may surprise you.
Databases⌗
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MobyGames: is the oldest, largest and most accurate video game database. Spanning over 260 platforms from 1950 to date. For 20 years, it’s been widely considered the IMDB of the games industry and often referenced as the canonical source for game information.
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No-Intro: catalogs the best available copies of ROMs and digital games, providing DAT files for ROM managers and an online database.
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Redump.org: is an disc preservation database and internet community dedicated to collecting precise and accurate information about every video game ever released on optical media of any system. The goal is to make blueprints of the data on console and PC game discs. Redump also provides guides to ensure the dumps are correctly done. Users of the website who follow the guides correctly are encouraged to share their results to help build the database. Multiple dumps of games with the same serial number by different people are collected to ensure the same results are gathered, which help correct any incorrect dumps in the database as well as to help recognize alternate versions of the same game.
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TOSEC: The Old School Emulation Center (TOSEC) is a retrocomputing initiative dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and resources for microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles. The main goal of the project is to catalog and audit various kinds of software and firmware images for these systems.
Public Archives⌗
Safety First!⌗
- ALWAYS be careful when downloading, and especially when executing ANYTHING from public sources!
- NEVER put ANYTHING questionable along side of ANYTHING critical or personal!
- It’s really hard to check ingenuity and trustworthiness of public sources, you can easily get something very nasty.
- Make sure you run it in a safe environment like virtual machine or isolated box.
- At least scan it with antivirus and limit network access.
- Respect the intellectual property rights.
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The Internet Archive Software Collection: largest vintage and historical software library in the world, providing instant access to millions of programs, CD-ROM images, documentation and multimedia. The collection includes a broad range of software related materials including shareware, freeware, video news releases about software titles, speed runs of actual software game play, previews and promos for software games, high-score and skill replays of various game genres, and the art of filmmaking with real-time computer game engines.
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The Macintosh Garden: is an abandonware archive, dedicated in particular to supporting the Macintosh computer platform. A notable feature of Macintosh Garden is its emphasis on emulation, encouraging users to run historical software on modern systems. Software featured on the Macintosh Garden has been discontinued by their publishers and is no longer commercially available. The Macintosh Garden aims to preserve these treasures for future generations, providing documentation and downloads of the original files.
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My Abandonware: was created in February 2009. Over the years, thousands of games have been added to the site. Authors want to create the best video game museum on the web and let everyone around the world enjoy the incredible amount of great software created in the 80s and 90s. 18k+ games are available at the moment. They also have nice useful links section.
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The Patches Scrolls: a very well known website that hosts patches, mods and demos for games since 1995.
Also take a look at:
- free and open source game engines that allows to play old games on modern platforms.