I’ve always been curious… are there concrete definitions of “abandonware” in the various major jurisdictions? Or is it just a loose concept that remains legally dubious?
I feel like “Adopt an Abandonware” would be a pretty great source of meaningful, educational, and productive projects for devs with extra cycles or looking to refine skills.
There is no legal definition of abandonware and everyone in the community knows and understands this.
It's just a case of "the lesser evil": preserving games when nobody who owns them cares enough about them to sell them or make sure they can still be run.
I think few people would say it's a "lesser evil" but something that is morally fine and should be legal (when no money is changing hands).
If you were, say, selling abandonware that's much more of a murky area, but just downloading a copy or giving people a copy of some data that is no longer sold - whoever has ended up with the copyright shouldn't be able to complain if they are not actually making it available for purchase - they shouldn't be able to claim any loss since by not selling it they are not being deprived of any revenue.
Of course, part of this is only a problem because copyright terms became absurdly long - if we had sane copyright terms like strictly 25 or 30 years from publication a lot of this stuff would be public domain by now anyway.
I don't disagree that it's morally fine -- after all, the abandonware community wouldn't make the downloads available otherwise -- but it's still not legal.
Home of the Underdogs used to get tons of aggressive cease and desist emails from ESA (then named IDSA), the group representing game publishers legally, and who supposedly are on the "side" of games. So aggressive in fact they sometimes got it wrong (like sending a C&D for a game which was public domain). And who was willing to take a stance and chance it?
Back then the abandonware community was one of two things, I think: people who just wanted to download games (Warez or abandonware was the same to them) and proper members of the community, who'd rather see these games either commercially supported or made public domain. Both HOTU and Abandonia replaced download links whenever someone found a legal way to buy the games.
Though there's the fun twist that Epic has their own competing storefront now and it doesn't include either Jazz Jackrabbit game. What does it say about a company like Epic that their own storefront doesn't include most of their back catalog? It certainly feels abandoned if not abadonware.
It's worth mentioning that there's a dedicated online community over at https://www.jazz2online.com/ and the linked discord, which maintains a community patch called JJ2+ (https://docs.jj2.plus/) which does amazing things with the game, including online coop.
Looks very cool, fingers crossed multiplayer support gets added at some point (noticed it says 'Multiplayer is temporarily removed in version 1.0.0.' on the website).
Thanks for digging this detail out! I'm a bit disappointed since I was looking forward to playing this with friends again (fond memories), but I can totally understand how the dev might not have the necessary time to implement this.
If you want to play online, I recommend checking JJ2+, jazz2online.com and the discord link there. It's fairly easy to setup. You just need the base game, which is available on GOG and runs perfectly fine one modern Windows computers. Check gog.jj2.plus website for the installation process.
Apache is what's serving the error page. It's whatever is behind Apache that is failing
I've had an Apache server running on a decade old laptop on the HN front page, serving a custom PHP+Mariadb blog without caching, works just fine. It's big projects like WordPress that reliably go down from more than a handful of visitors per minute with bursts to a few in one second, if you don't have a caching layer that turns it into the equivalent of a static page generator
I wish Jazz had been more popular. I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2, and I believe there were plans to make a third, but they decided it wouldn’t sell enough copies. If anyone here can recommend platformers similar to Jazz that run on a Mac, I’d love to play them. I never got into shooters or 3D games, but always enjoyed platformers like Mario and Contra, and Jazz felt perfect for me.
Yeah, it's interesting, but I think it's not a huge loss. Early 3D games have aged very badly, while many from the 2D era are still perfectly playable. So a higher res 2D followup might have actually been better.
I would check out Celeste or Shovel Knight. Neither is exactly the run and gun style of Contra or Jazz. However, Celeste is extraordinarily polished with best-in-class controls and movement, and Shovel Knight borrows heavily from classics like Mega Man while ditching the stuff that didn't age as well.
Although I never played Jazz Jackrabbit, I remember in our town there was this guy (I think he was a picture frame-maker) and I think my dad was friends with him.
I remember going downstairs into the work area and I remember he was playing Jazz Jackrabbit on his old computer, and I remember thinking that this game must be epic.
Anyway, random story. It just evokes that memory for some reason.
You would think current advances in game engines would make it a lot faster these days.. getting it just right like the old game is probably the most difficult part.
I have fond memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit...and Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Secret Agent Man, Jill of the Jungle, and so on. Epic Games and Apogee were the logos I remember seeing most often.
We were allowed to play Castle of Dr Brain in class, but there was no save feature, so some of us got pretty good at speedrunning the first puzzles to spend the rest of class on the next one.
Such a simple but awesome game. The level editor was hours of fun. And the best part, it worked on all my friends computers, no matter how cheap or old they were!
Apogee had some great games for their time. Some of the full versions and many of the free/share ware versions are available at the various DOS game archive sites.
Ah yes, we almost finished Death Rally with a Sentinel (best car in the shareware version).
Sometimes I hang out with my little brothers on Discord, with one of us playing DR (or a similar game), the rest watches the stream. We have some snacks and pretend we travelled back in time to the era when we shared the same PC and had a (very elaborate) hot-seat queueing/watching and commenting system.
"streaming" as watching your buddy play in the same room beats Twitch for me every time!
Recently I had fun with The Curse of Monkey Island and Microsoft Bob experienced in the same way. Although the latter is more like bringing your friends home for a Tommy Wiseau movie night.
Recently, thanks to linux gaming support, I was able to run Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (using proton). Nothing beats fun nostalgia. So happy it lives forever on open source now.
Looking up images of DOS platformers like Secret Agent and Crystal Caves reminds me of a game that was loaded on some elementary school computers in 1998. I don't recall if they were Mac or DOS, but they certainly weren't the cutting edge G3. I think the game had a character in a trench coat and they were maybe a sleuth of some kind. The color palette was dark but there were yellow-ish lights coming from above in a conical shape.
I know memories are usually warped and wrong, but hopefully this is enough of a description to jog someone's memory. I have been able to rediscover all of the games I played as kid. Most I never revisited, but it feels satisfying to learn what they were. Big ones that bugged me for ages are Tyrian and Descent.
The mention of Secret Agent above reminded me heavily of it, but I remember the character being about twice as tall on the screen.
I think it is likely an Apogee game or by someone inspired by their art. I haven't found a solid hit of what's in my memory after looking through their catalog and a quick glance through a wider list. It may just be busted memories and it is Secret Agent. It's unsatisfactory though because every other vague memory has turned out to be more accurate than not.
The detective character you're describing sounds a lot like the character from the Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets series. I've linked a video but not sure if it's the exact game you're thinking of
It's definitely it. I think the overhead light I'm remembering is from Mission T.H.I.N.K., but I do remember the Gizmos & Gadgets levels. Thanks for finally quashing this curiosity. I can die in peace now.
Tried this for recent DosGameClub and it's not quite perfect yet, though a huge step up from the original if you cannot stand how zoomed in the vanilla game looks.
Similarly OpenJazz allows playing Jazz1. It has even more quirks than Resurrection, and can similarly allow zooming out with higher resolutions
I loved this game growing up, I'm definitely going to give this a try.
As a minor observation, I'm pretty (pleasantly) surprised that the project provides a NixOS package for the application. As somebody who tends to flit between Arch, Fedora, and NixOS, seeing packages for NixOS before Fedora availability is a very surprising signal in terms of Linux distribution popularity.
As a kid, my family got a new PC and it came with the full version of Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Both the campaign and the local multiplayer were a lot of fun, but quite often the multiplayer crashed. I also read about the game having a level editor called the Jazz Creation Station, but my copy absolutely didn't come with it. I looked though the game files and all that. I loved level editors so I was really disappointed.
We had a closer look at the disc and it was a mysterious "OEM Version" (I know what that means now, but none of us did back then). But it said version 1.0 so surely it was meant to have everything? We contacted Gateway, like "is there any way we can upgrade to the actual final version of the game?" And the answer was no.
They were bundling an unfinished version of the game!
----
> OEM Versions
> These beta versions were originally distributed alongside Intel's manufactured hardware, as a result of a partnership between Epic and Intel. While most people who acquired these versions assumed they were the same as the retail release, they were actually builds from halfway through the game's development.
> Two OEM versions exist: 1.00g, which is the most common, and 1.00h. These versions have quite a lot of differences compared to the final release, such as different file formats, many levels use different tilesets or are in different orders, many sound effects weren't coded yet into the game, different screens for loading and menus and different and/or glitchy physics for weapons and objects.[0]
Funny, I'm in New Zealand and I'm guessing you probably aren't, which means Gateway must have done the same game bundle around the world. Did yours also come with an exceptionally crappy two-button gamepad by any chance?
Redline Racer felt really smooth with great graphics for the time. I loved how eventually you started unlocking ridiculous gimmick bikes like a hover bike and a dinosaur. I don't think I ever quite unlocked all of them.
Half life (1998) also had an OEM version called "Day one" containing the first half of the game along with some slightly last minute changes missing from it, compared to the released version (different handgun ammo count etc).
Wondering why oem versions were dumbed down pre-releases
116 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadedit: Looks like this project started in 2017, but it made leaps in the last year.
http://deat.tk/jazz2/release-notes
I feel like “Adopt an Abandonware” would be a pretty great source of meaningful, educational, and productive projects for devs with extra cycles or looking to refine skills.
It's just a case of "the lesser evil": preserving games when nobody who owns them cares enough about them to sell them or make sure they can still be run.
But legal? No.
If you were, say, selling abandonware that's much more of a murky area, but just downloading a copy or giving people a copy of some data that is no longer sold - whoever has ended up with the copyright shouldn't be able to complain if they are not actually making it available for purchase - they shouldn't be able to claim any loss since by not selling it they are not being deprived of any revenue.
Of course, part of this is only a problem because copyright terms became absurdly long - if we had sane copyright terms like strictly 25 or 30 years from publication a lot of this stuff would be public domain by now anyway.
Home of the Underdogs used to get tons of aggressive cease and desist emails from ESA (then named IDSA), the group representing game publishers legally, and who supposedly are on the "side" of games. So aggressive in fact they sometimes got it wrong (like sending a C&D for a game which was public domain). And who was willing to take a stance and chance it?
Back then the abandonware community was one of two things, I think: people who just wanted to download games (Warez or abandonware was the same to them) and proper members of the community, who'd rather see these games either commercially supported or made public domain. Both HOTU and Abandonia replaced download links whenever someone found a legal way to buy the games.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_collection
https://www.gog.com/en/game/jazz_jackrabbit_2_collection
Maybe it was abandoned for a time until GOG picked it up.
I've had an Apache server running on a decade old laptop on the HN front page, serving a custom PHP+Mariadb blog without caching, works just fine. It's big projects like WordPress that reliably go down from more than a handful of visitors per minute with bursts to a few in one second, if you don't have a caching layer that turns it into the equivalent of a static page generator
it's not very good though (except the music, Alexander Brandon is still amazing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gckYADZp0A
Yeah, it's interesting, but I think it's not a huge loss. Early 3D games have aged very badly, while many from the 2D era are still perfectly playable. So a higher res 2D followup might have actually been better.
That game is the dark souls of platformers though.
Hollow Knight, Ori, Celeste.
For multiplayer, Towerfall.
I remember going downstairs into the work area and I remember he was playing Jazz Jackrabbit on his old computer, and I remember thinking that this game must be epic.
Anyway, random story. It just evokes that memory for some reason.
OMG! Jetpack from Adept Software is still available?! https://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/
And the lost mind/island of Dr. Brain.
I wish I could still play them!
They have Lost Mind as well, but not emulated because it's a Windows game. I wouldn't be surprised if it still runs, though.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker
It's extremely faithful to the original in terms of "feeling", to the point where it satisfies my TIM nostalgia
Sometimes I hang out with my little brothers on Discord, with one of us playing DR (or a similar game), the rest watches the stream. We have some snacks and pretend we travelled back in time to the era when we shared the same PC and had a (very elaborate) hot-seat queueing/watching and commenting system.
"streaming" as watching your buddy play in the same room beats Twitch for me every time!
Recently I had fun with The Curse of Monkey Island and Microsoft Bob experienced in the same way. Although the latter is more like bringing your friends home for a Tommy Wiseau movie night.
Abuse had that crazy scriptable level editor, I must have spent more time in it than actually playing.
Looking up images of DOS platformers like Secret Agent and Crystal Caves reminds me of a game that was loaded on some elementary school computers in 1998. I don't recall if they were Mac or DOS, but they certainly weren't the cutting edge G3. I think the game had a character in a trench coat and they were maybe a sleuth of some kind. The color palette was dark but there were yellow-ish lights coming from above in a conical shape.
I know memories are usually warped and wrong, but hopefully this is enough of a description to jog someone's memory. I have been able to rediscover all of the games I played as kid. Most I never revisited, but it feels satisfying to learn what they were. Big ones that bugged me for ages are Tyrian and Descent.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/358350/Secret_Agent/
I think it is likely an Apogee game or by someone inspired by their art. I haven't found a solid hit of what's in my memory after looking through their catalog and a quick glance through a wider list. It may just be busted memories and it is Secret Agent. It's unsatisfactory though because every other vague memory has turned out to be more accurate than not.
https://youtu.be/OzXHI22IOSA?t=113
edit: This DOS game might be the one you're thinking of
https://youtu.be/Wei0C21LBNM?t=28
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-vMxPcgnjo&t=4m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_T.H.I.N.K.
https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/OpenMoktar_Vita
[1] https://www.lemon64.com/assets/images/games/screens/blues_br...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blues_Brothers:_Jukebox_Ad...
I love that game!
I don't know of anyone else who's tenure in the industry is 30+ years.
It made a generation who can code!
Similarly OpenJazz allows playing Jazz1. It has even more quirks than Resurrection, and can similarly allow zooming out with higher resolutions
As a minor observation, I'm pretty (pleasantly) surprised that the project provides a NixOS package for the application. As somebody who tends to flit between Arch, Fedora, and NixOS, seeing packages for NixOS before Fedora availability is a very surprising signal in terms of Linux distribution popularity.
https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit2
https://macsourceports.com/game/jazzjackrabbit
The music was always a strong point, especially that it was typically at most four voices at once due to the file format used.
We had a closer look at the disc and it was a mysterious "OEM Version" (I know what that means now, but none of us did back then). But it said version 1.0 so surely it was meant to have everything? We contacted Gateway, like "is there any way we can upgrade to the actual final version of the game?" And the answer was no.
They were bundling an unfinished version of the game!
----
> OEM Versions
> These beta versions were originally distributed alongside Intel's manufactured hardware, as a result of a partnership between Epic and Intel. While most people who acquired these versions assumed they were the same as the retail release, they were actually builds from halfway through the game's development.
> Two OEM versions exist: 1.00g, which is the most common, and 1.00h. These versions have quite a lot of differences compared to the final release, such as different file formats, many levels use different tilesets or are in different orders, many sound effects weren't coded yet into the game, different screens for loading and menus and different and/or glitchy physics for weapons and objects.[0]
[0] https://jazzjackrabbit.fandom.com/wiki/Jazz_Jackrabbit_2/Dev...
Was very confused at the time that we appeared to have the full version but it was missing features. Still spent many hours playing it.
Edit: Also some motorbike racing game that came with the same (probably Gateway) PC. Can't remember much about it, but many hours wasted.
Redline Racer felt really smooth with great graphics for the time. I loved how eventually you started unlocking ridiculous gimmick bikes like a hover bike and a dinosaur. I don't think I ever quite unlocked all of them.
Ah I do remember the crazy bikes now! I need to find a copy of it. Just found a few YouTube videos.
Wondering why oem versions were dumbed down pre-releases
I love this game, especially because of the memories of her it brings back. We were just not a good fit (and I was too much of a child anyway).
Amazing open-source work!