If you want Monkey Island 2, it is considered abandonware for some time now... meaning you can download it "semi-legally" from severall "legal" hosts.
just like many other old games from the amiga/C64/Dos era.
Sorry but abandonware is fake. It IS illegal to download it and use it without a licence to said game.
Sorry but abandonware is fake. It IS illegal to download it and use it without a licence to said game.
thank you for bringing this up after we allready said that multiple times and came to the same conclusion after even more people said it.
that is the whole point why I said "legal" instead of plain legal.
It IS illegal, but if a company stopped production, sales and support on a product, said company can't really do much legaly.
Thus making abandonware VERY real, and the name is correct. If a game or product is free and licenced that way by a company, it is ShareWare or a form of FreeWare.
true abandonware is illegal, but not punishable by law.
(source: an international sales lawyer)
Lucasarts still provides support for 90% of their back catalog, making all free downloadable versions of those games 100% illegal.
but thank you again for reminding us what we allready came to know almost right away.
you would have known if you'd have read the rest of the posts about this.
I don't see the need for the Speech Project anymore, actually. Their main purpose was to record the dialogue. Even if in the SE you can't play the voices over the classic version, all the new recorded dialogue is already done and exists in the game's files. Why continue recording new dialogue when all the material exists there done by professional actors? All the speech project should focus on doing is ripping those professionally done sound files and applying it to the classic game, not new recordings, in my opinion.
Already in the works by another group on the Mix 'n Mojo forums. The result will be an installation file that will extract the voices from the SE (if you own it) and also the classic CD version game files (since they're embedded in the SE data files untouched) and extract them into a separate game folder that you can play with ScummVM. Presto! SMI classic with SE voices! I can't wait!
As Pale Man said, this is incorrect. Even most of the games from the DOS and Amiga/Atari era are not legal to download if the company has not officially released the game as freeware. The Scummvm website, which is an emulator that enables you to run many of the old games, host the freeware games that it can run such as Broken Sword 1 and 2 and Lure of the Temptress, but won't host Monkey Island because it is still owned by LucasArts.
However, if you do managed to get a copy of the game, I do recommend using ScummVM for running it, as these games just won't run on most modern machines at all, but with ScummVM not only can you run it but it will not have any problems at all (on mine anyway)!
There are cases where companies don't revoke their legal rights over the games but choose not to prosecute over abandonware. They accept the existence of abandonware sites and don't try to fight them. I don't think people should frett over the legal issues in those cases.
Other times companies have made it clear that they don't want their games distributed, and send e-mails to abandonware sites, and the honest sites take them down. You don't see LucasArts games on abandonware sites anymore because of that.
Honestly, I would have preferred it if they had released MI and MI2 as freeware instead of doing a special edition remake.
Already in the works by another group on the Mix 'n Mojo forums. The result will be an installation file that will extract the voices from the SE (if you own it) and also the classic CD version game files (since they're embedded in the SE data files untouched) and extract them into a separate game folder that you can play with ScummVM. Presto! SMI classic with SE voices! I can't wait!
Ooh, that sounds very interesting! Do you have a link to the project?
Comments
Sorry but abandonware is fake. It IS illegal to download it and use it without a licence to said game.
thank you for bringing this up after we allready said that multiple times and came to the same conclusion after even more people said it.
that is the whole point why I said "legal" instead of plain legal.
It IS illegal, but if a company stopped production, sales and support on a product, said company can't really do much legaly.
Thus making abandonware VERY real, and the name is correct. If a game or product is free and licenced that way by a company, it is ShareWare or a form of FreeWare.
true abandonware is illegal, but not punishable by law.
(source: an international sales lawyer)
Lucasarts still provides support for 90% of their back catalog, making all free downloadable versions of those games 100% illegal.
but thank you again for reminding us what we allready came to know almost right away.
you would have known if you'd have read the rest of the posts about this.
Already in the works by another group on the Mix 'n Mojo forums. The result will be an installation file that will extract the voices from the SE (if you own it) and also the classic CD version game files (since they're embedded in the SE data files untouched) and extract them into a separate game folder that you can play with ScummVM. Presto! SMI classic with SE voices! I can't wait!
There are cases where companies don't revoke their legal rights over the games but choose not to prosecute over abandonware. They accept the existence of abandonware sites and don't try to fight them. I don't think people should frett over the legal issues in those cases.
Other times companies have made it clear that they don't want their games distributed, and send e-mails to abandonware sites, and the honest sites take them down. You don't see LucasArts games on abandonware sites anymore because of that.
Honestly, I would have preferred it if they had released MI and MI2 as freeware instead of doing a special edition remake.
Ooh, that sounds very interesting! Do you have a link to the project?
EDIT: Never mind, found it already.