The minute to minute gameplay of this one is quite engaging for a nerd like me.
I dig this one a lot!
Rincewind , what is eXoDOS? Something we all should be downloading for all those systems as well? I'd love an Amiga, Atari ST, Apple II, DOS complete collection of RPGs at least (if that exists).
Okay, this will be an awareness-raising post to some of the excellent work our brave software archivists have been doing lately.
TOSEC (all platforms known to man)
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.
https://cors.archive.org/details/tosec
Lots of good stuff here, it's amazing.
Gamebase64
Collection of all C64 games in existence, pretty good.
FTP:
hostname: 8bitfiles.net
username: anonymous (and no password, that's it )
Look around in
/gamebase_64/Games/, the games are alphabetically organised into folders.
eXoDOS (MS-DOS)
From their
official site:
eXoDOS is an attempt to catalog, obtain, and make playable every game developed for the DOS and PC Booter platform. Striving to find original media rather than using scene rips. [...] This pack includes 7,000 DOS games. The focus is on games that were either released in English or are fairly easy to play without a knowledge of the native language. This is not every DOS game ever made, however it is a very high percentage of all commercial releases. There are thousands of freeware, homebrew, and shareware games that will continue to be added in future packs.
Version 5.0 is a bit north of 500 gigs though, so quite large. However, how much does a 2TB HDD cost these days? Like 50 bucks? Well worth the money, if you ask me. But you can just get the
lite version, which is just about 50 gigs (contains the basics and all the magazine scans, then you can download only what you're interested in on first launch).
Alternatively, version 3.x was split into multiple parts per genre (RPGs, adventures, action, strategy, etc.) You're not really missing out on anything if you only download the 3.x RPG pack instead of the full 5.0 release (probably some really obscure games were added in 5.0 but who cares). You can get the 3.x files from
The Eye (see below as well), or if you're not afraid of rutracker.net (and if your friendly ISP is not blocking it... but a VPN of course helps with that problem
), you can find the 3.x collection torrents there (Google translate is your friend).
They also have another
excellent collection for all of them ScummVM adventures (including datafiles for all games on almost all known platforms).
Retroplay WHDLoad Collection (Amiga)
The Retroplay WHDLoad Collection contains enthusiast-mainted HDD installers for pretty much every commercial Amiga game in existence (most of those are officially disk-only games). The whole collection is available on an FTP site (the English Amiga Board fileserver), and there was a Google Drive mirror as well which seems to be down at the moment. You can find more info about it on how to access the FTP in this thread:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=61028
There's tons of other good stuff on the EAB fileserver, for example, they host mirrors of the TOSEC archives for all Atari and Commodore machines. Some file paths to whet your appetite:
/Retroplay WHDLoad Packs/Commodore_Amiga_-_WHDLoad_-_Games/
Alphabetical folders, about 4GB
/Non Amiga/Atari/ATARi-TOSEC-2021-08-08/ST/Games/[ST]/Atari ST - Games - [ST] (TOSEC-v2020-07-12).zip
All Atari ST games, 2GB archive
/Non Amiga/Commodore/Commodore-TOSEC-2021-08-08/C64/Games/[D64]/Commodore C64 - Games - [D64] (TOSEC-v2021-07-26).zip
All C64 games disk images, 5GB archieve
/Non Amiga/Commodore/Commodore-TOSEC-2021-08-08/C64/Games/[T64]/Commodore C64 - Games - [T64] (TOSEC-v2021-07-26).zip
All C64 tape images, 900Mb archieve
There's tons of other good stuff, OS images, ROM images, magazines, demos, book scans, you name it.
Amiga Dungeoneering Collection
By one of our esteemed codexers:
Over 60 games for now, more games will be eventually added. With manuals, maps, box scans and whatever else.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/amiga-dungeoneering-collection.84467/
Also here:
http://www.indieretronews.com/2013/10/amiga-dungeoneering-collection-over-60.html
The Eye
Last but not least,
The Eye is a web based front-end of one of the largest archival projects dedicated to the preservation of the collective human knowledge. They actively encourage
leeching all the shit you can from their site without limits. It's unfortunately down at the moment due to a server upgrade, but you can find the eXoDOS 3.x collections there, scans of all sorts of magazines (including all Dragon magazines), and tons and tons and tons of other exciting stuff. Highly recommended.
