Recently, when I was searching for some traces of one old Raptisoft games it came to my mind, that there are still some working sites of small developers selling quite old (but still good) shareware games, which are also often sold in form of DRM-free or "almost" DRM-free (just with activation key). In some cases you can even order CD with your games (not sure how "presentable" it is though). Not to mention that some of those games are not available to buy anywhere else.

I had an idea to make a topic gathering links to such sites, here are some from me:

1.Raptisoft:
http://www.raptisoft.com/

Sadly, no longer they're selling Eggsucker, but you can still buy on their website Windows version of such games as Chuzzle, Hamsterball, Hap Hazard and Hoggy 2 (interesting thing - payment options include not only debit card and paypal, but even paysafecard)

2.Blitwise
https://classic.blitwise.com/index.html

Available Windows/MacOS games: Pocket Tanks, Super Dx-Ball, Neon Wars

3.Mountain King Studios
http://www.mking.com/index.html

This one was I've discovered by accident, aside from Raptor: Call of the Shadows (this one you can buy on GOG) they also have other titles such as DemonStar, Galactix and Treasure Fall.

4.Rake in the Grass
http://www.rakeingrass.com/

Sadly, most of their games are currently sold only via Steam, BUT you can download from their website two DRM-free games - Troll and Styrateg - for free!

5.Qumaron (former Realore)
https://qumaron.com/games/

Truth be told, most of their games are some "match 3" stuff, but there is one game worth your attention - Mad Cars from 2004. Really fun game (top-down racing+combat game), I've bought it about 4 years ago (very cheap, about 2 $)
https://qumaron.com/games/pc/mad-cars/


Feel free to share your findings on the internet :)

Knuckle Cracker - https://knucklecracker.com/ (Creeper World games + Particle Fleet)
Soldak Entertainment - http://www.soldak.com/ (Drox Operative, Din's Curse, Zombasite etc)
Basilisk Games - http://basiliskgames.com/ (Eschalon book 1 - 3)
Spiderweb Siftware - http://spiderwebsoftware.com/index.html (most games available direct from the developer)

Sean O'Connor's games ( critical mass, capture the flag ) http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/critical.html

Seems like the shareware downloads for Soleau Software (DOS games, Windows games) still exist, but the purchase page is dead, and the front page just says "Thank you for 30 years". Found a post from a year ago about using workarounds to purchase full versions, but that sure seems weird and risky.

Pixelmusement, home of Ancient Dos Games and Shovelware Diggers.

Steve Moraff used to sell things under his Moraffware label, but now as Software Diversions, he sells one and one thing alone.

Software Dynamics still sells Inner Space but good luck convincing anyone to pony up 23+$.

Mordor: The Depths of Dejnol and it's various development hell cousins are still for sale. I'm not sure I'd recommend them due to various rights and things.

Christain Boutin is selling a complete collection of his old games for a reasonable 14$.

Oh, and Carrsoft is still selling their old games in a no-frames basic website.

The Adventures of Maddog Williams is avalible for download.

MVP Software is defunct, but is allowing (unsupported) downloads of many old titles.

The Redwood Games (Math Rescue, Word Rescue, etc) site is still online, suprisingly.

Unofficial, recompiled builds of Rollcage and Rollcage Stage II (dubbed Rollcage Redux and Rollcage Extreme, respectively) are available for download on the website of Rob Baker, one of the original coders on the PC versions, as well as coder/one of the developers behind the spiritual successor to Rollcage, GRIP: Combat Racing (wishlist entry | another wishlist entry), here.

There's also a quite competent Tempest clone of his, titled Ultra, if you want to give that a spin.

Rollcage Extreme apparently needs a very specific version of the Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable (14.0.24215) to run properly.
The x64 and x86 versions can be grabbed here and there.

Most of the installments (Earthsiege, Earthsiege 2, Starsiege, Starsiege: Tribes, Tribes 2, Tribes: Aerial Assault and Tribes: Vengeance) in the Earthsiege universe (minus Metaltech: Battledrome, MissionForce: CyberStorm and CyberStorm 2: Corporate Wars) are still available for download through here.

One or two of the .ISOs were corrupt and couldn't be mounted or wouldn't proceed at one point during installation, if I recall correctly.
Not to mention, that getting most if not all of these to run on anything post-WinXP could prove quite the challenge.

Wow, thanks a lot for sharing your links! Plenty of titles I've seen for the first time, really cool that you can download them/buy them.

I've tried Pirate Battles from one of Darvond's links - surprisingly fun despite age.

No kidding. How many of these would also belong on the DRM-free digital distributors list (and aren't already there)?

The Rollcage Redux and Rollcage Extreme pages including the direct download links, since they're somewhat hidden and not that obvious to track down on Rob Baker's codemonkey.co.uk site:

Rollcage Redux
Rollcage Extreme

Probably also an indication that even these "unofficial, recompiled builds" couldn't be re-released on GoG without Sony's approval.


If you're in the mood for obscure Taiwanese idTech1/Build knock-offs:

https://mars3d-game.wixsite.com/index

"The 90s were the peak of 3D-shooters. Hits like "Doom" or "Duke Nukem 3D" dominated the genre and the PC market. Many Companies wanted a piece of the cake and started publishing their own titles. In 1997, a software company named "Engine Technology CO. LTD" based in Taiwan, developed their 3D-shooter named "終極戰士 / The Ultimate Fighter" also known as "MARS or MARS 3D".

This one was programmed in their own engine which was developed using reverse engineering the known top titles at the time. Program code had to be cloaked and even textures were taken from other games and simply modified at most.
The game didn't see commercial success in it's home country (some rumors say it was never officially sold) and never found a way to the western world.

UNTIL TODAY!

In 2013, a Chinese user called "Newclicker" uploaded an ISO of the original CD-ROM and another user, "Player Lin", uploaded a bad English transcript in textform on YouTube.
2018, some retro fans sacrificed their time to translate the whole game into English, so that it was possible to play a full English copy under MS-DOS. Additionally, a new cover art based on the original one (which is in no good quality available) was created, as well a new manual and an own new setup program was designed and a physical version of the whole game was manufactured and released in small quantitie.

...

After all copies from this community-release are out of print, we release the ISO of the translated version for free for everybody.

- CLICK HERE FOR DOWNLOAD -"

Gameplay/Review

Midnight Synergy

https://www.midnightsynergy.com/games.htm