With My Abandonware, we have an endless source of free games, most of them mythical from the 80s and 90s.
Android has tools to run games from platforms like MS-DOS, Scumm or Commodore
When we talk about playing games on our Android mobile, we inevitably think of Play Store as the official store for apps and games. The Google store hosts offline games , ideal for situations in which we don’t have connectivity, and beyond the popular titles that make headlines, there are even more possibilities outside of it .
For example, Netflix is another major source of mobile games, and if you subscribe to the streaming platform you can download free games . And if you’re more into retro games, this website is a real gem, with over 30,000 titles available . You might think you’ll need to run them on your computer, but no: your Android phone is also capable.
Our colleagues at Genbeta have shared an important library of abandonware games . If you don’t know what this word means, we’ll summarize it easily: games that are no longer distributed commercially, that also have their support ended and sometimes, their copyrights have changed.
So, abandonware games can be run legally and for free, there’s just one catch: they’re usually very old, ideal if you’re into retro, but they ran on platforms that are now obsolete . This is My Abandonware, a complete library of titles that many will remember.
Currently, the website hosts some 30,900 games of various genres, many of them legendary gems from the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Pacman, Sim City, Prince of Persia, Arkanoid, Test Drive … the list is almost endless, we would need several lifetimes to enjoy them all.
The site also lets you search for games by name, year, genre, publisher, developer, and even platform. Looking for an MS-DOS game but can’t remember its name? No problem with the advanced filters. And if that wasn’t enough, each title comes with its own screenshots, description, and lots of information: size, languages, release date, and download links .
If you have them, in each tab you will see the game’s extra content, such as expansions . In some cases, it is even possible to play from the browser without installing anything at all. You also do not need to register to download the files, although it is advisable to do so to create our list of favorites.
However, for those games that are not very enjoyable from the browser or that Android simply does not run, there is a solution. And this involves emulators of these older platforms.
Do you want to play the legendary ‘Prince of Persia’? Magic Dosbox is available on the Play Store for free. Gekko C64 allows you to run the games that ran on the epic Commodore 64. In the case of LucasArts graphic adventures, ScummVM is the alternative. It will be as simple as downloading the game files and adding them to their corresponding emulator, so we will have controls adapted to our mobile.