I got an 8 gig USB stick today, and other then the portable apps suite and Portable Fallout 1/2 (Don't worry, I bought a copy a while ago too.) I don't quite know what to do with it.

I needed it for small file transfer in school, the 8 gig was just a great deal.

DOS games work great since DOSBox is inherently portable (you can grab DOSBox Portable from PortableApps.com but you might already have it).

You can also use a switch with ScummVM to store user data in it's folder instead of in AppData so you can take some SCUMM games.

Emulators are usually good choices as well for portability. For older systems the games are especially small. Only emulator other than ScummVM I see putting stuff in AppData is recent builds of VBA-M. DOSBox seems to too but I guess having a dosbox.conf in the dosbox.exe directory overrides that.

You can also put Portable Ubuntu on it (google it) but I couldn't get it to start up at a friend's house under Vista while it ran fine on my computer under XP. Annoying.

I have VPN software (OpenVPN) to connect to a VPN I use so I can remote desktop.

Hmm what else... you could put QEMU on there, it's the only really portable PC emulator/virtualizer (the virtualizer part requires a kernel driver but you can start/stop/install/remove it at runtime with some batch hax0ring). Then you can have an entire environment in there.

Another option is to use Ubuntu's USB disk creator tool and just make a bootable Ubuntu (I have one on a 1gb stick). Not too fun for already running systems, but you MIGHT be able to stuck QEMU on there too if you fit everything right and make it also run inside QEMU so it can run on an already-running system.

You could even in theory hax0r Portable Ubuntu to run similarly, but that probably wouldn't work right.

Oh don't forget my own Google Chrome Portable (top two builds are the most recent).

Of course it mostly depends on where you use other computers and what you do with them (and what you can get away with doing on them).

[Edit: Oh yeah, backup. You can keep backups of important, non-replaceable files and still have plenty of room left for oldskool games.]

Portable Dark Forces, The Dig, Fate Of Atlantis, and Monkey Island?
However, Im not sure how to make ScummVM portable.
Poops, DF needs a CD.
I will never get any work done ever again.

Check section 5.1 of the ScummVM readme, specifically --config=file to specify the location where the config file goes. There are other path options but those can be set in the UI under Options > Paths (IIRC you can then edit them in the config file to make them "relative" paths so they're not tied to a specific drive letter). By default the save/theme/extra paths use the current directory anyway on Windows so you don't even need to set them.

DF no cd crack is easy, as is JK. I have both on my thumb drive.

For DF, copy the CD.ID file from the CD to your DARK directory, then edit the DRIVE.CD file and change the letter in there to C (regardless of your actual drive letter). Then make sure you mount the DARK folder as C:\ in DOSBox when you run Dark Forces and it will work without a CD.

Oh yeah you need a "full" installation from the CD for this to work of course. You can always copy the files over by hand to (be sure to remove the read only attribute).

Unreal Tournament.
Zsnes.

I think you meant SNEX9X. No one uses ZSNES anymore.

Oooo I need to get my snes9x off my external hdd and onto my mbp. I've not put it on since switching from my powerbook!

I use ZSNES.

Neither is updated anymore, so what does it matter?

Actually... looks like ZSNES "died" more recently. Last update was in 2007, Snes9x hasn't been updated since 2006.

Unless "Snex9x" wasn't a typo, but Googling it seems to indicate that's all it is.

Snes9x can't output sound correctly on my computer. All I hear is a garbled mess, and this is after I played around with the setting to fix it. I don't have that problem with ZSNES, although I will say ZSNES's UI is an abomination.

I think you can search for portable games... they are cracked obviously, but there are quite a few available online now.

Visit The Underdogs hall of fame for lots of classics that run under DOSBox.

Yeah no-cd cracks are very useful for portablizing games.

Yeah, but cracks are usually for games you've already installed. I'm talking fully portable games, as in you unzip anywhere, and play anywhere, without installing.

I just want to know, will this work if the other computers I use this on like randomly resigning it? It's been a U drive, an N drive, and a Z drive today.

Don't know how it'd run on other machines or via a flash drive, but Darwinia's CD only weighed in at 50 meg, and it's a pretty cool game.

Well, if you really want DF to work, get a PSX emulator, the PSX version of Dark Forces, and bind the controller functions on the emulator to match the original DF.

The PSX version is notorious for looking and working like crap.

That's usually part of what makes an app "portable". All the ones I've listed meet that requirement.



It's probably bigger than the DOS version too, plus PSX emulators are more complicated than DOSBox and take more CPU power. Plus, no mods. Can't play the Dark Tide on the PSX version!

Problem- ScummVM and DOSBOX are pointing to files in the drive as if it has a fixed letter (F:\ScummVM\Games\Monkey Island for example) when it changes frequently on different computers.

Help?

Ahh right forgot about that. Edit the ScummVM config file by hand and remove the drive letter and colon from all paths, that will turn them into relative paths, which work just fine last I checked.

Alright, that's going to be annoying but I can do it.
What about dosbox? I'm using the DOG frontend because I have no clue how to autostart a game otherwise.

I don't use DOSBox frontends so I don't know how portable they are. DOSBox itself is perfectly portable.

Usually you can just run DOSBox and pass the DOS exe name as a parameter and DOSBox will launch it correctly. Some games might need their own config tweaks and such though which makes it a little more complicated.

Roms/Emulation are the best. (Don't lecture me, I actually OWN almost all the games worth having for NES/SNES/N64). Just wish I could get them on my PSP without custom firmware