Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/11/legendary-abandonware-site-hom.html
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I recall a fairly obscure game called Crime Fighter on PC. Imagine the board game Life, but with the premise of committing as many crimes as possible, add the ability to create, recruit, train, and equip your own gang. Mini-games, turn based tactical fights against the police or other gangs and multiplayer. The game was a ton of fun and i have fond memories of playing it with my brother and our neighbors.
I checked Google and apparently it’s available on the Google Play Store. That’s pretty awesome. There’s also a Bomberman+Dig Dug game i used to play a lot on PC as well, and as you collected loot on the board you could slowly upgrade your equipment to have different kinds of bombs and mining equipment. Forget the name for this, i’ll have to find it… i know i had found it some years ago but it’s also pretty obscure. (edit: found it!). It’s Mine Bombers, page isn’t loading for me right now, don’t know if it’s a firewall issue at work or if the page is borked but pretty sure that’s the game as i got the link from a forum post someone had directed at me some years ago 
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recently i’ve discovered that dosbox supports Roland MPU-401 devices via a built in emulator-- if you can find the ROMs.
It’s quite a step up from my youth, when I had naught but cheap soundblaster clones to work with. MIDI music sounds fairly awesome now…
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I was there in the thick of things for many years. Things weren’t always quite so rosy. You may say it “applied the archivist’s exhaustive eye to the 1990s ramshackle abandonware scene”, but in fact many of the larger games were cut-down rips, sometimes with missing or re-compressed movies and sound in order to produce palatable file sizes in those days when bandwidth wasn’t what it was today. Sometimes the copy protection was badly cracked, making it difficult to get some games running even on the hardware and operating systems for which they were initially designed. (Things got easier towards the end when DOSBox emerged.) Of course, it can be argued that it served an important purpose to keep these games around in some form at all rather than letting them vanish into obscurity.
The original site limped along for a while in the absence of Sarinee before the ISP finally went belly-up with very little warning, taking with it the message board (which had started getting a little weird by then). The review database was still salvageable and a number of revival attempts sprung up, most of them lacking the game downloads. I am surprised to learn that (if the article is some indication) there’s one of them still actively maintained and being fixed.
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Funny, I recently just stumbled across a newer indie game that some people were describing as being similar to Mine Bombers
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Oooh nice! Mine Bombers was definitely underappreciated, I’ll have to check this other game out
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