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Comment by udp | Hacker News Reader

On a slightly different vein, if you still have the old games you can often find an open source engine to play them with :-

* Old Bioware games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, ...) - GemRB: http://www.gemrb.org

* SCUMM (Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer, ...) - ScummVM: http://www.scummvm.org/

* Transport Tycoon Deluxe - OpenTTD: http://www.openttd.org/en/ (this has optional free replacements for the graphics/sound/music, too)

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Let's not forget the venerable DOSBox, which allows a huge variety of old games to run on Win7, Mac and Linux.

Some of my favourites: Wolf3D, Doom, Rise of the Triad, Hexen, Duke3D, Quake, Sim City 2000, Sim Ant, Civilization, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Warcraft & Warcraft 2, Theme Hospital, Syndicate, System Shock, X-Wing

http://www.dosbox.com/

Apropos System Shock, the sequel runs fine in wine, and is easier to enjoy, because they use the modern fps controlling conventions. Thief: The Dark Project uses a the same engine as System Shock 2 and is also worth playing.

If you are going to play X-Com: Ufo Defense, you owe it to yourself to use XComUtil [1]. XComUtil patches the binary to remove some bugs and can optionally introduce new gameplay elements.

Also the original Master of Orion is still one of the best civilization type games, if not the best. It has aged well, and really shines in its concentration on large scale decisions, and avoidance of micro-management.

[1] http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=XcomUtil

There is an RA1 reimplementation called OpenRedAlert.

If you're on a Mac and like extra-fancy UIs, there's also the DOSBox-based Boxer: http://www.boxerapp.com

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