Pros:
- ZDoom will work more often on outdated computers
- Unusual mods can be played even if they aren't acknowledged classics which demanded patching
- Old demos can be watched
- No coding needed to implement
- Fewer whiny posts from people like me who weren't around back in the day, begging someone to find the CD with v2.0.xx and upload it again
- Too much work; if you're so interested, just recompile
- Gainsaid by much content on this very forum. Here is a constant stream of requests for far more obscure items, most of which are answered within days. Further, they must be answered again periodically as the sharing links expire, while this only needs effort once.
- I'm not a programmer, but programmers have impressed upon me the difficulty of building decade-old code with a different OS and tools than the original. It becomes a whole new level of ridiculous when the application centers on low-level 3D rendering (even now, so many bug reports are about portability). If a player appreciates modding history and can get an old Windows version working, that should be enough on their end.
- Automatic compatibility takes care of this
- It's a fantastic addition, but each special case has to be implemented and tested from scratch; we shouldn't assume the developers will have time for everything. Releasing a mod or a speedrun is, afaict, not a commitment to update your work indefinitely as the engine evolves. A modest investment of time (I guarantee someone has that CD, it's just not me) would help preserve it for some years yet.
- Some releases are ambiguously licensed
- I don't mean to downplay this -- the licensing change was clearly a pain in the duodenum, and I take such issues seriously on the site where I'm a mod. That said, every beta I've been directed to (readmes, reviews, Usenet) still has source in the official Github or Sourceforge projects. It must not have been a deal-breaker.
- Beta builds may be unstable
- This should have little impact given that each package will be fired up only occasionally, to load a particular mod. When incompatibility bites someone with a vanilla mod, they get pointed to Chocolate, but there is no equivalent for ZDoom, nor does that seem likely in the future given the maintenance burden per #1. Anyone who actually adopted v2.0.xx as their primary engine would be, I assume, a retrogamer who knows what they're wading into.
- Old versions are less secure
- Unquestionably, but again that's a choice best made by the individual downloader. How many people here have their location public on Facebook, or store financial records in a phone app? By comparison, the risk of encountering an exploit in a mod (which has already been played and enjoyed by a crowd, back when the associated .cab was new; there is no indiscriminate feed of 2004 files to guzzle) seems extremely marginal.
That got long. Thanks for reading.
