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:
  • Server space, Do you have a server space and some bandwidth? We desperately need these to host files!
  • 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 ;)

• 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.