Games on a thumbdrive?

oh come on, no one? i call bullshizninny!

Why don't you find an old console emulator?

If I remember correctly there's tons of NES, Sega, SNES, N64, MAME emulators out there. 1000's of great games, all the way back to Atari 2600. They hardly take up any space.

now - don't ask me about legality. I don't know exactly where each emulator stands right now. That you'll have to figure out on your own.

Yes, an emulator is one of the things I'd put on it, but I'm wondering if it will work. I think a basic .exe would work just fine, but a program like Mozilla or maybe one of these emulators may want to install itself. I'm wondering about the kind of programs that can be run right off the thumb drive and not intrude on the host PC's OS.

You are looking for games that do not need to write to the registry.

In general, any game that uses Direct X is out.

We're talking mostly about indy games, doshinshi games.

right.. but the real question is.. has anyone done this before with success? if so, tell me how.

Look for the thread on TH called "Fun with flash drives"; it's about a month old.

I've tried looking for it myself (via search function it comes up at June 11 2007). I tried the link but it didn't work because these forums are all screwed up now.

I know that Mozilla has firefox portable which is meant to be put on a thumbdrive. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

dude, honestly... with a little will, there's a ton of games you could prolly install on your thumb drive... I know that you could get diablo 1 to run on one... with a no cd hack. and like the other guy above me said, emulators for consoles. That could be several hundred hours of fun, specially if you have a usb controller that doesn't require installed drivers. yes, firefox does have a portable... there IS a website for all of that stuff, but i forget what it is, and is for supported apps only i believe. ummm... any flash games, you could prolly save the web page or just the flash location to your drive and see if that works... If you have a big enough flash drive, you could prolly install linux, and run a full version of ubuntu off it at work... ( wouldn't recommend this if there are any security systems dependent on the pc you're using... of if you think you'll get busted if it'd be difficult to get on the network ) but other than that, just plug your drive in, and install stuff to your flash and see if it works :-p

oh yeah, you could prolly pop some movies on it too... that's simple and makes for hours of entertainment... maybe e-books?

oh yeah "fun with flash drives" was one of my posts. :-p

I heard of someone who has a bunch of the Street Fighter 2 emulated games on a USB stick that uses a certain program to run each game

Fantastic! thanks guys  

I have jnes.exe on my jumpdrive along with about 300MB of nintendo games...zsnes.exe is a good one for super nintendo too...lots of flash games there that, on the outside, appear to be word docs or excel ss and they have a fairly small footprint...hope that helps

Games I can confirm to run without being "installed," aka drag the install folder to a drive:

Anarchy Online
Call of Duty 2
Deus Ex 1
Doom 3
Empire Earth 2
Far Cry
GTA 3
GTA Vice City
GTA San Andreas
Halo
Just Cause
Manhunt
Painkiller
Prey
Quake
Quake 2
Quake 3
Quake 4
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
STALKER
Starcraft
Supreme Commander
The Suffering
Unreal
Unreal 2
Unreal Tournament (not 2004)


Anyways, those are games I still have install folders for from previous Windows installations. They run just fine for me. I keep them in a folder called "\no install needed."

Some games I know don't work without registry information:
AvP 2
any Command & Conquer game
Riddick
Earth 2160
Unreal Tournament 2004

The ones that will work will often need no-CD cracks to run without the disc. Assuming you have a big enough drive (or an external hard drive) to store the game installs on, yes, many games can run without technically being installed. Good luck!

Civilisation 2 also ran without needing to update the registry. I got it working on the university machines before I bought my own PC. IIRC The music was all played off the CD though.

Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 work as well.

I used a 2GB thumdrive and put Halo 1 on it, all u hav to do is change the installation location to your Thumb drive

Yes you can.Just go to google and type in firefox portable and click the first website on the list,on the right somewhere there will be a link that says "download now",click it and and then save to whatever drive your thumb drive is in.Then go to your thumb drive page and install it.And thats all

I actually did that for at my previous work site (no I didn't get fired for it, they just had the computers on lock down). I wanted to play some Zelda from one of the N64 emulators but didn't want to install anything onto my work computer. I put it all on the USB drive and it worked just fine.

CDisplay and comic books  

Ultimate Xmen is really good!

any new additions? had to resurrect this one. looking for stuff to load my thumb drive with to play at work?  

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey