How you can help Home of the Underdogs

If you are reading this, that means you are interested in helping us-- thanks! There are many ways you can contribute-- please read this page carefully before you contact us.

• Server costs: While we will never charge anything for the site (it's the designers who deserve credit, after all, for giving us these wonderful games), we do pay thousands of US dollars for bandwidth costs every month to ensure a reliable service and decent download speeds for everyone. There are several ways you can help us cover these costs:
  • Click sponsors banners, or at least let them display: Although the majority of banners we use are pay-per-impression (meaning that we are paid per page view regardless of the number of clicks), clicking on our sponsor's banners (both top and bottom one) once in a while will ensure that we are allocated new, profitable ad campaigns, and that our sponsors don't boot us out of the network due to lower-than-average click-through ratio.
  • Help 'seed' large files if you use BitTorrent: The bulk of our traffic (hence bandwidth bills) goes to huge files that we host on our server, and BitTorrent is only as useful as the number of dedicated 'seeders' - people with high Internet connection speeds who keep the original ZIP file they download from our site on their hard drive, for the benefits of other BT users. Therefore, you can help fellow BT users (and our bandwidth situation) dramatically by helping us host these files. When you download that 200MB monster you had been looking for, please consider seeding that by leaving the zip file on your hard drive :) If you are willing to be dedicated seeders, please download this file [1.84MB] - it contains all the torrent files on this site, so you can choose which ones to seed. This file is updated every month or so. The size of total files linked from these torrents is around 10 gigabytes, if you are curious ;)

  • Make a donation via PayPal: The most direct way to contribute for PayPal.com members, this service allows you to give money directly to your favorite website (us, of course ) via your PayPal.com account. Just click on the PayPal box on the left-hand menu bar to go to the PayPage where you can donate as much or as little as you want to help us. Every little bit help, so thank you in advance :) We'll never block your access to the site if you never visit the PayPage. We'd like to profusely thank those of you who do, of course ;)

  • Buy games from Chips & Bits, a gigantic US-based on-line store that stocks many out-of-print titles as well as new releases. We get 5% commission when you buy games from them, so please bookmark the store with that link if you like them enough ;)
  • Buy games from HOTU Store, our very own on-line store that sells shareware/independent games for Windows PC. We list only games we like, so we are confident you will like them too :)
  • Buy HOTU merchandise: Let others know how much you like this site by wearing/using our merchandise :) All prices are $1 above CafePress' base prices, so every purchase will help pay our server costs ;)
  • Advertise on the site: If your company runs a business wants to reach hundreds of thousands of hard-core gamers, you can advertise on the site. Please read our advertisers page for more information.

  • Sign up at SkillJam.com - a great new service that pays you money to play games! If you like addictive on-line games like PopCap's Diamond Mine, Tetris, trivia games, and more, you might as well try to win cash while doing that ;) We get commission for each new registered user we refer to SkillJam, so please use this link if you are interested in signing up with them :)

• Wanted games/non-monetary donations/personal checks: Being rabid collectors that we are, we are constantly looking for underrated oldies that have slipped through our grasp. Please browse our Want List and let us know if you can help locate them. In addition to specific games on the want list, we are also always looking for obscure (i.e. 1980 - 1987 games) oldies that we may not already know about, or knew at one point but have since forgotten. So if you have a large number of games from this period, please send us a list of what you would like to contribute.

  In addition to games on the want list, we also take donations of all kinds: if you have games, game-related books, manuals, or gamebooks that you don't want to keep anymore, or want us to save for posterity, Home of the Underdogs will be a good new home :) You could also send us personal checks, if you would like to donate money but feel uncomfortable with PayPal. Please feel free to send them via snail mail to the following addresses:

  1. (For games on 5.25" disks, or any copy-protected/key-disk protected games that must be cracked):
     
     Home of the Underdogs
     PO Box 50094
     Minneapolis, MN 55405-0094
     USA
     
  2. (For all other donations, including non-5.25" or protected games, manuals, gamebooks, personal checks, or international money orders):
     
     Home of the Underdogs
     PO Box 335
     Phrakanong Post Office
     Bangkok, 10110
     THAILAND
     

• HOTU Community: Since the site's humble beginnings in 1998, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of visitors who visit our forum and chatrooms - both on the web-based chatroom and our #Underdogs channel on EFNet. Our forum in particular has grown to be a lively, friendly place where regulars chat away about games, oldies, nostalgia, trade jokes and witty remarks, and discuss real-life issues outside the realm of games. Underdoggers are a diverse bunch, from different countries, religions, sex, and backgrounds. We always welcome new company, so check out the forum and chatroom, and make yourself at home :)

• HOTU Team at United Devices: Here's how you can make a difference with your PC. United Devices is a great company founded to allow PC users to help various humanitarian projects that require significant computing power, such as cancer research. Using Intel's "Peer-to-peer" technology, your computer's unused resources will be harnessed to help the effort. All you need to do is download the small software from United Devices which will run the background, and communicate with the server when you are online. If a good cause is not enough incentive, you can also win various prizes based on your contribution. We even have our own HOTU Team you can join :) Joining our team is a great way to get to know HOTU forum regulars (as we chat constantly about the projects we are working on), and to spend those long hours downloading our big CD-rips for a good cause :)

• Game reviews & comments: You can post your own comments on any game on the site, or apply to be a gamehost if you want to add your own reviews. If you're passionate about a game and feel it's not given due respect on this site, this is your chance :)

• Documentation: We are always looking for manuals that we don't already have, especially for war and strategy games, since many of them are next to impossible to play without instructions. Because we constantly scan and compile or own manuals, please ask before sending anything. If you have the manual in electronic format already (.txt, .doc, .pdf, etc), you can e-mail it to us directly. If you have the original paper manual, there are several ways to get it to us:
  • If you have a scanner: Ideally, we'd love to have the manual in .PDF format, which can be created using Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (NOT Acrobat Reader) and above. You can also use PDFCreator, a great freeware program that makes .PDF files. If you don't have the time to compile .PDF file, please send us a zip file containing scans of the pages in JPEG (.jpg) format, using 200x200 dpi resolution, "black & white" or "OCR" mode, so we can compile them into PDF ourselves (other resolutions are either not supported by Acrobat, or produce poor results).
  • If you do not have a scanner: We would like to either borrow your original manual, or a photocopy of it; you can then send it to us via snail mail (see HOTU's Bangkok address above). We'll cover all costs you incur; please contact us for shipping information (yes, we DO take our hobby seriously ).

  We'd also love to have any other game-related document, e.g. maps, solutions, FAQs and the like. If you have something that you think will be of interest to fellow gamers, pass it along!

• Game / Company information: We strive to make all the information on this site as accurate and complete as possible. After all, every underdog deserves a second chance. To that end, please feel free to contribute anything to make each game's info sheet more complete, including screenshots, boxshots, fansite URLs, company information or history, or any technical notes you think others will find useful (for example, if a game only works in pure DOS mode). If any information on this site is wrong, please let us know as well.