All About Freeware

While commercial software products are typically designed to use recent operating systems and fit on a CD, freeware software development should be approached differently. Here are a couple of tips for programmers who create freeware applications or games…

1. Keep the disk space requirement low: People don’t want to wait hours to download a program, and some need to conserve hard disk space as well. It is amazing what sort of software can fit in under a few megabytes, if efficient programming techniques are applied. Think of the old Sierra graphical adventure games which were sold on a couple of 720k disks, with mouse/joystick support and multiple graphics modes.

2. Cater to older or less common operating systems: Sometimes development for a niche audience is more likely to attract users. For example, plenty of web browsers already exist for Windows XP, whereas there are only a few for DOS. More people will be interested in a new freeware browser for DOS, while the Windows XP browser would have to be especially remarkable for anyone to use it.

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