I’ll share two I recently found:
Wizardry Llylgamyn Saga (https://archive.org/details/wiz-ls-pc)
Sword Of Moonlight King’s Field Making Tool (https://www.swordofmoonlight.net/) [haven’t tested this yet on Win 10 but I think it works]
https://www.myabandonware.com/ for anyone who wants some free games that are in a legal grey area and you don’t have to worry about the piracy police getting you.
Escape Velocity: Nova - One of the all time classics of open world games being a space trucker that gets wrapped up in galactic events. Sort of unknown because it came out on Mac at first, then was ported much later, then the studio behind it vanished like a soap bubble. The fan community maintains their own set of download links
Star Control II / The Ur-Quan Masters - Open world space RPG that’s not quite like anything else. Kind of unfair and old-school (take notes, save often, and rotate those save files), but really a wild story of interlocking open pieces, and fantastic character writing. Not quite abandonware, but the devs open sourced it (The Ur-Quan Masters is the open source name). If you’re on Linux, it’s probably available in your distro’s software center.
Cave Story - Excellent indie story-platformer from just before people started being able to make money off those things. Was originally free, then was given an “upgrade” (made worse) by a company that royally screwed over the original dev. The fan community maintains their own set of download links including a modern engine rewrite that works on modern systems. (If you want to actually pay for this, don’t, and instead buy Kero Blaster)
Damn, I did not know this. I think I bought that version too. I did buy Kero Blaster though.
Ambrosia software was still active until maybe several years ago I believe, they were just pushing out mobile puzzle games etc.
They became a holding company in 2013 and completely shut down in 2019
Star control 2 fucks. Highly recommend. Basically a proto Mass Efect, but still better thannit in a few ways (if obviously much less ‘cinematic’ and character driven).