

This site has only one page of educational titles.

One website that is great for quality over quantity is C:Dos. There are famous old classics like The Amazon Trail, Einstein Jr.'s Classroom and even Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.Īnother fantastic website for free educational abandonware is My Abandonware, which has fourteen pages of classic titles in the educational section, including great classroom applications like Adventures in Math, Barney Bear Goes to Space and Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego? This website is actually a very large collection of abandonware covering many different genres, but if you click on "Education" you'll discover more titles than you'll know what to do with. The most popular, and also the largest archive of abandonware, is The Home of the Underdogs. There are a number of great resources where you can obtain classic educational abandonware, but in this review I'll cover the top sources that feature the most titles. Once you can run one game, you'll have no problem running the rest. If you need technical assistance to install any of these on your classroom computer, try to get the help of your local computer support person. Usually it involves right clicking on the program and selecting "Run As Windows 95." or a similar command. In Windows XP or other older versions of Windows, there are various ways to run older programs like this. On the newest versions of Windows, such as Vista or Windows 7, there's a special application called DOSBox, which you can use to run classic DOS games. If you decide to download some of these old, free abandonware titles, the first thing that you're going to need to figure out is how to run DOS games on your version of Windows. Even though that most likely no one will complain if you download and utilize free Abandonware in your classroom, it is frowned upon to try to resell or otherwise make money from the software. Technically, the work is still someone else's intellectual property. Technically, this means that the classic DOS games that were created throughout the 1980s now fall under the "Abandonware" category.Įven though many people feel that the copyright on old software is no longer legitimate, there is certain etiquette associated with using a piece of software that someone else wrote. Copyright Law implies that the copyright on creative work, such as books or software, lasts just under thirty years. Abandonware is an application that was written many years ago and where the original creator or the company that owned and distributed the license is no longer maintaining the software or offering copies for sale.
