Favorite Freeware

[Jorpho]

Well Sim City Classic, (up until I found this odd patch with sheer luck a month ago or so) Sim City 2000 for WIndows. Under 8.1/10 64bit Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga, my Star Wars x-Wing collectors box (why both are up for sale), Civilization for Windows (win7 64bit and up), Williams Pinball Classics (encore software release for win 32 only too) and various others. I know if someone wanted to steal win 3.11 the early SC and Civ games would work, but I'm just not doing that.

As far as the hot games goes, I was thinking popular franchises. Pre windows 8.1, Win7 even 64bit I had found this german guy had made these brand new installers for Lucasarts games for X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and Indy Infernal Machine which I had been using but they don't like win 8.x or 10. And of course the Sim City 2000 fix I found recently to make that one work too. The old Duke Nukem 3D and Wolfenstein 3D have 32/64bit windows patches (steam/gog I know have them but I mean side projects) so they work. DOOM along with its .WAD file buddies (Heretic etc) have multiple offshoot projects to run the old games. The point was that very popular older 90s games that don't work anymore have been made to work by talented people, but so many, like the old Civ (and same engine Colonization) for Windows have not. Sim City hasn't either, but since that OLPC system got the freeware (sans name now as) Micropolis that's taken care of too.

It's kind of hard to follow your post, but for most of those it's not so much a matter of "smart coders" as it is that the original source code was released. And the SimCity 2000 "fix" you found is almost certainly some sort of rip from the official 32-bit Windows version.

But I guess we're getting off-topic now.

Can anyone recommend any new freeware games (2005 or newer)? Most of this thread has focused on games which are pretty old, and that's cool. There is a lot of good old stuff out there, but... has the concept of true freeware died in contemporary times?

I hear Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy is fairly enjoyable – it sounds like Psychonauts crossed with some much less whimsical FPS game – though technically that's 2004.