Thread: Abandonware Petition

Hi folks,

I used to frequent these boards more often with my hopelessly inept questions in regards to C, but I wanted to come in and see if I could point some of your gaming community towards a Petition which hopes to draw attention to the Abandonware issue, and maybe get the publishers to loosen their grip on copyright held on classic games of yester year.

An article here explains the thought behind the petition

http://www.exiled-gamers.co.uk/articles/abandonware/

and the petition itself is held here

http://www.petitiononline.com/oldgame/petition.html

Some people may think that old games aren't worth the trouble, they won't have the cutting edge graphics of modern games and may be difficult to get running. However the key to this is we'd like you to get a chance to see these games. To download them legally and get to see for yourself why they're considered classics. But unless the publishers release their death-grip on the copyright of games they never plan to publish again, you'll never get to make that decision yourself.

So do us both a favour. Read the article and if it makes sense to you sign the petition.

Could people also spread this around please... the more people it reaches the larger the petition and the more chance it will have some effect.

Cheers

Signed.

I didn't read the petition or the thread, but I'm WAY convinced that anyone gives a crap about online petitions.

Originally Posted by SMurf

This is a joke. Can anyone say "asset"? (Preferably in a cut-glass English accent, none of this Canuck dialect)

If these companies ever find themselves short of a buck/design talent they can unearth their back catalogue, give it a polish (it's an awful lot easier with the source code/content to hand) and sell it again.

Heck, I reckon LucasArts still makes money from games it made over ten years ago. An exception, perhaps, but still.

But it's not like we're asking them to give up the copyright of the game, all we want is to be able to buy the old games themselves - not for the company to release the copyrights, etc.

Online petitions aren't too great (But.. gosh darn it... I really want to save One Tree Hill, can't you feel my pain?), but we're also attempting to contact the publishers/developers for feedback, as well as trying to get the bigger game sites to push this issue - I'm at a loss of how else you can show numbers supporting this though.

If online petitioning couldn't save Stella, then what can it save?

You can't buy these games online? ID Software still has support for commander keen, wolf3d, doom, hover3d, etc.

Originally Posted by SMurf

Then there's the little matter of support. This isn't so much of an issue, but certain games will not run on a modern computer. Maybe they will with some sort of emulator, but in order to satisfy trade laws the publishers may be required to include these emulators with their old games to sell a "working product". The GPL strikes again.

Again, this is something mentioned in the campaign; in order to remove any burden from the publisher, the games could be sold as is; no guarantee of them working, no promise of tech support.

I agree, something like Steam/EA Downloader (Since EA did publish a lot of the titles that are now hard to find) would be an ideal way to distribute the games.

100% accurate emulation uses software mode only. Look at how MAME is setup and you'll understand a bit of what's going on with the emu stuff.