Matrix Games Forums

Every once and awhile people post about the good old days of hex based war gaming. The post below was copied from our good friends at GrogHeads and gives players a chance to relive bygone days. I haven’t tried the links, but I’m posting it here for those who might. Actually, a game of Velikiye Luki might be fun.

Regards


Saw a FB post about Classic Games. Basically the site allows you play games using a browser linked to a dos emulator. So you aren't downloading anything, just using your browser as a window into the server running the game. They do not charge for accessing and playing the games. They do ask for donations.

They have many SSI and SSG titles as well as the Atomic games V for Victory series. For example Velikiye Luki and Stalingrad.

https://playclassic.games/games/turn-ba ... ki-online/

https://playclassic.games/games/turn-ba ... ad-online/

A quick look at the "who are we" page makes them out to be from Slovakia. I guess they at least think they are operating legitimately. I am no IP lawyer, but I guess they might be in a "grey area". Possibly that they own a copy of the game, and you are just accessing their machine running the game over the internet. Kind of like that old streaming movie service in the US that would hook you into an actual DVD machine running a legitimate copy of the movie for you (I don't know what happened to them).

Play Classic Games make a statement that copyright holders who don't want their games on the site can ask to have them be removed. Given that most of these companies are long gone, and the games are from the 80s and 90s, I doubt they get many requests...if any.

Hopefully someone with a better legal background can opine as to the legitimacy of this approach.

Thanks for the links! Couple things, the post says,

" ... allows you play games using a browser linked to a dos emulator. So you aren't downloading anything ...."

I am not an Internet Expert, but AFIK, this site most certainly "downloads" things to initiate the process, and ....

Also, the statement that

" ... the "who are we" page makes them out to be from Slovakia. I guess they at least think they are operating legitimately ...."

Another red flag ... nothing against Slovaks, but these statements give me pause.

I hope that someday, something like a MAME emulator might be made available to be able to play these classics.

I think a few are already available on archive.org

Interesting!

Interesting site, and some classics there for sure. I tried to have a look at the code to see if they might just be leeching off the Internet Archive, but looks like they host the stuff themselves. It's certainly faster than the Archive, that's for sure.

As for legality... well, it's murky waters. On the surface, they're not doing anything else than the Archive is doing with their emulated DOS/Amiga/C64/AppleII games. But there are some games there I definitely think are not out of Copyright, like Civilization, Steel Panthers (still owned by Matrix?), Worms or Diablo (Blizzard could hit hard!), and the console game publishers are known to be nasty with protecting their IP no matter what. So I think they're likely operating on the illegal end of things and just hoping to not get noticed too much.

Then again, most of these publishers are long gone and some, even if they still own the IP, will probably not care a bit about it. Like MicroProse, their games are probably still owned by Atari but again I doubt they care much. And the site says it will take down any game it receives a legal notice for so that's the "DMCA" sorted (possibly...)

I've used several of these Abandonware sites over the years, but sadly they all tend to disappear after a while. Either for legal reasons, or simply because it costs a lot of bandwidth to run a popular site with downloads. Mostly they die for lack of money to cover bandwidth costs, or lack of time or interest to maintain and support the library.

I tried it on my tablet - kindle - just messing with it looks like good stuff I still have some of the original games in the boxes