I've been a bit quiet online for the last week as I've been sorting my Retro/Vintage collection out a bit and have rediscovered quite a few things I had tidied away and forgotten about! I have a spreadsheet containing the details of the permanent pieces in my collection, but it's a continuous work-in-progress as before I get a chance to complete it I've purchased something else at either a car boot sale or (in more recent times) on eBay and I get distracted and move on to unboxing/unpacking my newly acquired items!
I think I have around 70 games (around 50 in DVD jewel cases and 20 in the old boxes they used to come in) but I don't know for sure as that's one thing that I have never gotten around to documenting.
I'm planning on using more of my games collection when it comes to testing the Retro Laptops that I have but the current issue I have is that I have no idea what games are compaitble with which laptops so I am now developing a spreadsheet that has that information on it.
This is what I started with:
Using the information from the back of the games I have put both the minimum requirements and recommended requirements in along with some notes on what else is on the disc like Acrobat Reader and Internet Explorer etc. but it took quite a while to gather the information as it's all in the very, very small print on the cases so I decided to see if there were any databases of PC Games with their specifications already out there that I could use to create a more streamlines spreadsheet of my collection.
After spending some time searching I finally came across
www.gamesystemrequirements.com which seems to contain most of the games I picked at random to search for, it contains a lot more concise information which is exactly what I was looking for and will save me having to read all the small print on the back of the cases. The idea behind the spreadsheet is to make it easier to see what games I can use to test a specific laptop based on the CPU and RAM it happens to have and what OS I have installed - going forward I should then be able to see at a glance what games will run on Windows 98 for example.
After comparing what is written on the back of the jewel cases and what is listed on the Game System Requirements website I see that there are quite a few discrepencies so I cannot rely on it fully and still have to check the back of the games, but it has helped me lesson the amount of data that I am collecting and my spreadsheet now looks like this:
All I've got to do now is add all the software I have including all the DVD jewel case types, big box versions, CD jewel cases, software in CD sleeves and in my CD/DVD organisers!...
**EDIT/UPDATE**
Here's what it looks like with a few more entries: