The only advantage the CDs have over digital copies in my opinion is that they still have value after you buy them. You can sell a CD for a decent amount. A limited edition (btw I never understood how a digital copy can be limited) can have quite a value for collectors.

I for one can't even manage my CDs, I threw them out a couples of years ago.

Dude, did you seriously just set up an account to troll around? :)

If Cheech and Chong were hipster gamers they'd totally agree with you. Whatever it is you're on about.

might consider a HDD rather than those USB sticks , the price isn't mentioned , but i doubt it will be cheaper than a HDD with same capacity

It's around 650€ for 512 GB here. :p

ouch >.<

more than 800 euros here .... yikes

What if your games are not compatible with future OSes, Harddrives, etc.

What if your pen drive brakes?

What if windows as a PC OS dies and the only OSes in the world are for tablets (becauses tablets and smartphones are replacing desktops and laptops remember?)

Last year or so I tried to make a disk image of my original Heavy Gear CD, just because I hated the loud whirl sound it made on my old laptop's CD-ROM drive. I figured it should be very straightforward, it being so old game and all. But it wasn't, I tried several well-known CD-image applications, and none made a working image of it at least with the default settings, nor could I figure out easily what would be the correct settings.

I think I found some instructions with google how to make one, but the instructions were a bit complicated, so I couldn't be arsed to do it. So I listened to the loud CD whirl sound when I was playing Heavy Gear.

Then again, what's the point of the physical games, if you are going to make CD images of them anyway? :)

That said, I have earlier carried some CD sleeve packs with like 50 PC game CDs in them with my laptop, when I was travelling around. But nowadays I wouldn't be arsed to do that anymore.

Then you play the games either on emulators (like DOSBox), or the original machine(s) for which the game was originally meant for (like the several Win98SE/XP retro-PCs I still have around, or my PS2).

Buy a new one, and copy the data back to it from your backups.

See the reply to the first question.

:)

What if an emp hits us? What if science as an art dies? What if we regress back into the stone age again? But yes, USB Flash disks dies faster than a HDD.

You have heard of the phrase "nothing lasts forever"? Just the other day I took a hard peek into one of my older HDD, and took out T32k (old turrican clone). No such luck because win7 does not support 16bit software. For that I have to fire up the old ME/XP computer.

Just see how MS is desperately trying to ignore backward compatibility, and are changing too much too soon.

That`s why opensource is the only way to ensure that the future generation can peek into and run them on modern computers. As for any HW, well, they corrodes away slowly anyway. :D

What if Emulators are outlawed by something like S.O.P.A.?

Are emulators not in the favorable light of copyright law?

Indeed, not being able to run applications using 1994-and-earlier technology in 2013 is "changing too much too soon".

16-bit was deprecated with the launch of Windows 95 (autumn 1994), and only lost support completely with the 64-bit (x86-64) versions of Windows (NT-based, rather than DOS-based) that appeared 7 years later (32-bit Windows 8 probably runs the game fine still). 64-bit Windows only started getting traction with Vista and got common with Windows 7. Though 64-bit versions of Windows XP existed, they were never aimed at home users, the first 64-bit Windows offered pre-installed to home users was Vista and selecting a computer at random still had a higher chance of getting a 32-bit edition until after Windows 7 had been around for a while.

Linux, on the other hand, never had 16-bit application support to begin with, so the only 16-bit applications it runs are - yes - ones for other operating systems and thus run through some measure of emulation or translation layers (such as Wine, virtual machines, or full emulators, depending on which OS and hardware platform the application is built for). I'm quite sure BSD and Solaris long ago dropped any native 16-bit application support they may once have had.

Shit, you got me. All the GOG games using DOSBox or ScummVM are obviously outlawed, and feds will soon come to get me, even though they don't even have authority here.

Your questions are similar if someone is saying "You should use a safety belt while driving.", and you'd come up with:

- What if you drive off of a high cliff?
- What if your car is hit by a big trucks from two different directions?
- What if your car gets hit by a RQ-1 Predator because US army is seeking you for your connections with terrorists?

Yeah, I guess in those cases the safety belt wouldn't help much... but still, other than that...

Correct and there we got the longer version :p

I realize I stretched that one. We can`t live in the past forever, right? For some reason the whole backward compatibility issue with MS Office came to my mind. I still wake up in the middle of the night because of all the screams from "unhappy" clients :D