HoTUD is an Abadnonware site which was originally based around the idea of only supporting abandoned games which were not successful but still fairly good. As opposed to sites like "Abandonia" which was handling titles that were abandoned but also pretty successful in their heyday.
The problem with Abandonware sites, is that when you DO find a game for download that noone is selling or cliaming the rights do, that typically you need to do a lot of work to get it to work on your system. Trying to get Dosbox to work (even with a frontend) is something I (and many others) have not been able to do reliably. The same can be applied to other nessicary emulators, slowdown programs, and other things.
Differant people have differant degrees of luck however.
I have mixed feelings about "abandonware" sites that charge anything. On one hand I feel what makes this legitimate is the fact that they aren't charing to make money off someone else's work. Comments about how "bandwidth isn't free" bear a great deal of validity, but at the same time it's impossible to verify whether the person involved is just covering costs or making any kind of a profit.
Then again there is also the entire issue that if I pay for a game, even a tiny amount of money, I expect it to work. These old games are hardly plug and play. I've gotten some to work one way or another, and others just will not function. I'm not going to pay anything to effectively play Russian Roulette with a game I might not be able to operate. If someone charges me for a DL under any justification they had best have found a way to ensure that program is going to run quickly and easily on my current system.
That said there ARE numerous old games I'd pay a couple of bucks apiece for if they could be made to reliably run on my system.
>>>----Therumancer--->
