How to play abandonware games: guides for more than 50 systems - My Abandonware

New to abandonware? Most machines in our catalog have their own guide. The platform shown in the Downloads block of a game page tells you which one to read. Some games work with little effort, while others can take a long time to get running. This page covers the problems they all share.

Windows games, from Windows 95 to XP and later, are the largest part of our catalog, with about 12,000 titles: their guide holds the many small tricks they need. DOS games come next, with about 7,500 titles: if you are not sure where to start, start with the DOS guide.

The Sub Pages menu, after the Table of Contents, holds the same list as below. Also, don't miss our list of useful links for abandonware.

The quickest way: play in your browser

Many small DOS games can be played right away, with nothing to install. Look for the Play in browser button on the game page.

It works only for DOS games and many PC booter games, and best with small ones. For big games, or for any other machine, install an emulator: the DOS guide and the guides below explain how. On a phone or tablet, see our mobile guide.

Additional platforms will be playable in the browser in the future.

All our guides

Most platforms (or machines) in our catalog have a page here, more than fifty of them. Pick yours below, or start with multi-system emulators if you would rather install one program that runs many machines.

A machine you cannot see is either sharing a page with a close relative — the ZX81 sits with the ZX Spectrum, the Game Gear with the Master System — or it is on the rare systems page. A few have no emulator at all, and they have a page of their own.

PC, Mac and Linux

Home computers

Consoles and handhelds

Phones and organisers

Everything else

Which file should I download?

A game page can list many files. Take a game file from the Downloads block, for the platform you want to emulate. The Extras below it hold manuals, patches, demos and fixes.

In the Downloads block, files are grouped by platform: "DOS version", "Amiga version" and so on. The same game often exists for several platforms, and each one needs a different emulator, so pick the right guide. When a platform has several files, read their titles: they can be other releases, other languages, or individual disks of one game (games used to be shipped on several disks).

The Extras block sorts the other files by type: Manual, Guide, Patch, Fix, NoCD, Demo, Map and more. Take the manual when you can: many old games need it, as explained below. A NoCD file only matters for a game on CD or DVD, see the Windows guide.

Most files we host are zip archives. Unzip one before anything else, with the tool built into Windows, macOS or Linux. If that fails, use one of the archive programs listed below.

Archives other than zip

A few archives use a less common format: 7z, RAR, LHA, ARJ, StuffIt... Your computer cannot open them without extra software. Install 7-Zip or PeaZip on Windows or Linux, and The Unarchiver on a Mac.

All three are free:

7-Zip: a classic on Windows, free and open source. It opens 7z, RAR, LHA/LZH, ARJ, CAB and disk images such as ISO and HFS, among many others.
PeaZip: free and open source, on Windows, Linux and macOS, with more than 200 formats. A good pick on Linux.
The Unarchiver: free, on the Mac App Store. It also reads the old formats of each machine: StuffIt (.sit, .sea), BinHex (.hqx), Compact Pro, ARC, ARJ, LHA and Zoo.

What you may find, and where it comes from:

7z and RAR: the most common ones, found on every platform.
LHA or LZH: the usual format on the Amiga and on Japanese computers (MSX, PC-98, X68000).
ARJ, ARC and CAB: old DOS and Windows formats. 7-Zip and PeaZip open them.
StuffIt (.sit, .sea), BinHex (.hqx) and MacBinary (.bin): classic Mac formats. For a Mac game, open them inside the emulated Mac with StuffIt Expander: extracted on Windows or Linux, the game loses the Mac-only part of its files, and will not start. The Mac guide explains it. The Unarchiver keeps that part on a recent Mac, so it is fine to look inside.

Watch out for .bin: on the Mac it can be a MacBinary archive, but for other machines it is almost always half of a CD image, with a .cue file beside it. Read CD images below.

ISO and CUE/BIN files (CD images)

Many games come as a CD image, a near perfect copy of the original CD. DOSBox opens ISO and CUE/BIN images itself; for Windows games, you may need a mounting program.

Several formats exist: ISO, CUE/BIN, NRG, MDS/MDF, CCD/IMG. Most formats other than ISO and CUE/BIN come with Windows games: see below to open them.

DOS games

DOSBox mounts CD images with the IMGMOUNT command. Always open the .cue file when there is one: it lists the music tracks, which many CD games of the 90s play.

The DOS guide explains the command, and how to do the same thing in a frontend or in DOSBox-X.

Windows games

Windows generally opens ISO files by itself, but if you see an error message, you need another program to mount the ISO.

For BIN/CUE, MDF/MDS, NRG, BlindWrite (B5T, B6T, BWT) and other rare formats, install DAEMON Tools Lite. Although it has many flaws, it's the only updated software capable of properly mounting almost every disc image.

Windows 10 and 11 open ISO files with a double-click, and they open no other format. Windows may first show a security warning, "Do you want to open this file?", with "Unknown Publisher": this is normal for any file downloaded from the Internet. Click "Open". Windows is also picky about the way the ISO was made, and may show a corrupted disc file error. Use this table to pick a program:

ISO file: if Windows shows an error when mounting the ISO, try WinCDEmu then DAEMON Tools Lite.
BIN/CUE, MDF/MDS, NRG, BlindWrite (B5T, B6T, BWT), CCD/IMG and other rare formats: use DAEMON Tools Lite. Many of these images have several tracks, a data track and music tracks.

Disc image mounting software on Windows 11

Simply put, to mount tedious ISO files, use WinCDEmu ; for other formats, use DAEMON Tools Lite.

WinCDEmu is open source, free and easy to use. It mounts ISO files and CUE/BIN images with one track. With several tracks, it opens the first track only: the music is missing and some games refuse to start. Use it for ISO files and single-track images only. To determine the number of tracks of a BIN/CUE, right-click the CUE file and open it with Notepad. If you see several TRACK lines, the image probably carries music, and WinCDEmu won't do.

DAEMON Tools Lite is the free version, and it mounts almost every disc image format. The DAEMON Tools Lite installer is tricky. Its setup often offers extra software or paid trials, be extra careful during the install. Read every screen, untick each offer you do not want, and pick the free option when it asks. Download it from the official site only. You can also pay for a clean installer.

The following programs are fine for ISO files, but do not rely on them for BIN/CUE, MDF/MDS, NRG or BlindWrite images:

Virtual CloneDrive: light freeware, no ads, classic for single track images. It does not mount multitrack BIN/CUE image, but works well otherwise.
MagicISO MagicDisc: an old freeware that still runs on Windows 98 and Me, good for old machines. The website is gone now, but you can download the original setup for Windows XP to 8 or the old one for Windows 98 / Me / 2000.

Once installed, these programs usually mount an image with a double-click. Beware, some images contain extra data (copy protection) that only DAEMON Tools can read. Without it, the image won't mount, or the game won't run without a crack / NoCD. Having DAEMON Tools installed for these cases will prove useful.

Hybrid CDs: one disc for PC and Mac

Many CDs of the 90s were hybrids: one disc with a PC part and a Mac part. Each computer only sees its own part, so the same image shows different files on Windows and on a Mac.

The PC part uses the ISO 9660 file system, which every computer still reads. The Mac part uses HFS, the file system of the classic Mac. On Windows, a mounted hybrid image shows the PC files only. To look at the Mac files, open the image with 7-Zip instead of mounting it: it reads HFS and can extract it. To play the Mac version, give the whole image to a Mac emulator. A recent Mac is the opposite case, and the next section explains it.

Mounting images on a Mac

On a Mac, ISO files open with a double-click and rarely reports corruption. CUE/BIN files need DAEMON Tools Lite for Mac to be mounted cleanly.

You can also try to rename the BIN file as an ISO file: rename "gamefile.bin" to "gamefile.iso" and open it. It may work, but you lose the music if the game has audio tracks.

Error about an "unsupported file system": since macOS Catalina (10.15, 2019), macOS cannot read HFS (old Mac filesystem) at all. A CD image made for the classic Mac then refuses to open, with a message saying the disk is not readable or its file system is not supported. A hybrid image fails the same way, even though its PC part is fine: macOS sees the HFS part and gives up on the whole disc.

One workaround to get the Windows files: do not mount the image, extract it. Open the .iso file with The Unarchiver, and it copies the files into a folder. Then you can play the PC version in an emulator on your Mac. To play the Mac version of the game, give the image directly to the Mac emulator, which reads HFS fine: see the Mac guide.

The game asks for a code

Many games of the 80s and early 90s ask for a word or a symbol from their printed manual, this was a common copy protection method back then.

Look in the Extras of the game page: the manual, or a code sheet under Misc category, is often there. We are far from having every extras available, you may have to search the web for a scan.

Most of our archives are already cracked (copy protection lifted), so try to type anything, or nothing, and press Enter first. If that fails, look for the manual in the Extras block (Manual, RefCard), or search the web for a scan.

My antivirus complains

Antivirus programs often flag old installers, NoCD files and keygens, even when they are clean. Check a file on VirusTotal before you open it, and when in doubt, use a virtual machine.

Most of these alerts are false positives: old programs behave in ways that look strange to a modern antivirus. But not all NoCD files are clean, so read our FAQ about file safety and about NoCD files and keygens before you decide.

I need help, this is not working!

We do not provide support for running abandonware games. Ask on a forum about your platform instead: our guides point to some of them.

For DOS and Windows games, Vogons is the best place. The DOSBox subreddit helps with DOS games, and the PCGamingWiki community with Windows games. Also read the comments on the game page: other players may already have found a fix.

Tell them which game, which file, which emulator with its version, and what you see on the screen: you will get an answer much faster. You may even take some screenshots and share them through free services like imgur, postimages.org or allthepics.net.

First written by hand, and brought up to date in October 2026 against each program's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. The update was drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.

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How to Play Abandonware Games