I've said this before, but it's hardly an encryption and certainly nothing that I would call DRM or then I'll have to start calling a bunch of other things as DRM - things such as undocumented or obfuscated file formats for game data..

The "encryption" is just XOR or something comparable, and the "key" is the full text of the license, included right there next to the ROM files. You can even run the included utility in the emulated Amiga to produce a non-obfuscated ROM dump if you so desire, but why would you even bother? The key is just one extra field to fill in the emulator preferences and the emulator does it for you when it starts up.

The bigger issue IMHO is that the ROM code is not original but has a couple of minor modifications to it that prevent it from running on a real machine, and Cloanto doesn't like to advertise this fact much. But it's hardly relevant for the topic at hand..

Chill out, @PixelBoy, I am sorry if you feel I'm mistreating your childhood memories, it is not my intention.

All I'm saying is, the video game media is evolving fast, along with image and sound technology, development engines, unlike books and movies.. Which is a factual truth.

You can LOVE them oldies, but you just can't argue their time is done because the market evolved forward. Is there a spot for them still for nostalgic players? Maybe, if the price is right, in bundles..

Now, now, about California Games and Track 'n Field likes, true they were awesome for us kids but not for our parents paying the bills, my God how many "joysticks" those must have break apart, and the ill masturbating motion now that i think about it! ^^

I didn't call it DRM either, but it is encrypted. Not a problem if you intend to use the Amiga Forever emulator, but non-Windows users might want to use another. And what utility are you talking about?

I'm a non-Windows user and these shouldn't pose a problem with any of the UAE varieties. Are there even any other notable Amiga emulators and do they really not support the Amiga Forever ROMs? There's no reason not to support them, it's trivial, and they're the only licensed ROMs that you can buy.

Even WHDLoad, popular software that I run on my actual Amiga 1200 supports the Amiga Forever ROMs for creating an environment for older games to run on.

As for the utility I mentioned, I only found my Amiga Forever 2006 disc which is a bit old but I think it's Emulation/System/amiga_utilities/transrom. It's only relevance is being distributed with the package; dumping the ROM that the emulated Amiga sees is easy. I'm sure you can find a number of similar tools or just use a machine language monitor or something.


Edit: I came to think that I'm not even sure what's the most recent Amiga Forever that I have had and as I already have all the ROMs that I need I haven't really investigated the contents very keenly. I suppose it's possible that they have changed some things without me noticing.

Some games on gog were indeed also on the amiga and c64, and a few of the old pc games, in my opinion, were a little better on the commodore machines, other than the c64 version's lack of mouse support (as far as I know.) So if these games sell with their pc versions, it seems they would with their commodore versions as well. I wouldn't want to have to deal with annoyances like "disk swapping" or making save disks or all that.

The Wiz port of UAE doesn't, for example (at least not in any obvious or straight-forward way.) In any case, I was just mentioning a second source of licensed kick ROMs. And their non-encryptedness has served me well from time to time.


Thanks for that. I'll check it out.

GOG even sells the ealy Zorks and Ultimas. Zork had no graphics at all, no sound, and limited gameplay in some ways, but it's still here. I actually think the C64 version of Ultima 2 has a better color scheme than the PC version. SO it's hard to argue why Gog shouldn't offer c64 games, so long as they can reasonably get them to run, and people will buy them. I don't know how well Ultima 2 and Zork 1 sold here, but if it sold well, then there's a market for C64 games too. Indeed, the "hidden gem that withstood the test of time" is probably not that high, but it's probably true for 80's pc games too, which often had worse sound than the c64. So yeah, Gog does sell games from that era, so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't try c64 games.

Jumpman is brilliant and easily still worth playing. I've got a good list of C64 titles I think would be viable, but I won't bore you all with those here. Instead, have some Jumpman remake links:

[url=http://members.iinet.net.au/~cleathley/jumpman/]http://members.iinet.net.au/~cleathley/jumpman/[/url]

https://github.com/kavika13/jumpmanzero

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920388055/jumpman-forever

You do know that The Bard's Tale here also includes the Apple IIGS version of the original, which is one of the best versions of that very game?

Aztec Challenge!
I've played that game more hours then what is probably healthy. :D