Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

warcraft 3, sid's pirates, civ 3 or 4. portable of vlc for some classic 90's anime.

probably some snes roms, an emulator, and some ebooks

Elder scrolls morrowind. 12 hours should'nt be a Problem.

12 hour morrowind marathon begin. and a few seasons of TV series I like.

There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

Open X-COM. Or well, maybe the regular X-COM, that should run just fine regularly.

Some books as epubs or whatever format is convenient, and a reader. Would have to research which one works on Windows 2000 or ME. Or was it XP already?

Surprised no one mentioned GTA series

12h is barely enough for 1.5 out of 33 of Ascendance of a Bookworm volumes. I would probably rererereread volume 1 and 18

Mid 2ks? Baldur's gate, in whatever version was usable

Diablo 2 with a mod: Project Diablo 2.

I'd download an offline copy of the wiki, too. And a build guide; 12 hours isn't enough time to come up with a build and play the game!

Max Payne 1 and 2, F.E.A.R, Far Cry, MAME with a couple of arcade roms like Galaga, Tetris, Pang, Puzzle Bobble, Metal Slug.

And if I get bored with those there is always Microsoft solitair, mine sweeper and mayong to fall asleep on the keyboard.

Silent Hunter III

Sink some tonnage.

Some retro computer emulators(Atari 8-bit, C64) and my dev environment for them - when you target old stuff you can customize the whole dev tooling setup with very little compromise, especially if you go the route of assembly/Basic/Forth and then pile on higher level build steps. I'd have to be careful around the potential problem of "whoops there's a 64-bit binary in there and I'm on a 32-bit OS".

Basically if I were back in college it'd be that all the time, and then VLC and some anime or movies in 480p. No sense in keeping up with those darn 2000's games.

Install the gta 3d games need for speed most wanted 05 and music from 80s to the 90s

Zsnes and a few roms

I'd probably bring Warcraft III, Half Life 2, and potentially Deus Ex if the PC was extra shitty.

Morrowind, RCT2, Total Annihilation with all my mods and Deadlock 2 as well if I have time.

I would only need a copy of Gothic 1

Angband or umoria

Civilization 4, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White just to name a few. See you next year. :p

I'd copy my Doom and Quake folders, hoping the modern sourceports still work on them. Well, PrBoom+ and ZDoom should both work. Then all my emulators up to the 32-bit era, some music and the seasons of Kamen Rider and Ultraman that I'm currently watching.Honestly I could just bring my actual external hard drive or my HP laptop from 2013 that I installed Linux on. It's what I got on those.

0. Newest Linux distro
1. G4 and G5 MLP episodes

12 hours? Lol probably just some stuff to code on and screw around in. I'll probably take a nap in there somewhere to kill time

I'd love to chance to play a bunch of nostalgic titles - just off the top of my head I'd play DOOM, Uplink, Darwinia, Morrowind, and my trashy favourite from that era Themepark world. There are definitely more if I had time to think about it.

So, just a PC? No controllers or anything?

I might get a few 8 and 16 bit ROMs

And mainly movies, I'd get around to watching Rambo and get some other stuff