archive.org has a bunch of images of them, but i'll feel guilty of linking because their "shareware cd collection archive" also contains warez compilations.

I was going to hit archive.org but I was spending a majority of the search on textfiles.com skimming through all the relevant BBS archives. One of the developers I was looking for was "Just For Me Software" which produced RRR - Renegade Robot Retaliation (a crappy wolf3d clone) but funnily enough I found zero traces of this title, instead finding educational games developed under their name... I guess they were really ashamed of RRR, I know I would.

It's also worth noting that some of the games in these CD's needs a pretty old system to work correctly. (Even the machines I had at the time were to fast, e.g. pentium II) There's also alot of actual freeware in it too not just shareware.

I have a 2-disc compilation called "Softkey Shareware 2000 Hit Games", which I got many years ago. One CD is dedicated to Windows 3.1 titles, the other to DOS titles. A huge amount of the software in the package was seemingly copied on with no regards to whether it worked or not, plus a handful of the games are clearly full versions, cracked, or both, even though 98% of the stuff on the discs are definitely shareware versions.

haha softkey.

/g/ a while ago had a thread of some guy obtaining one of softkey's 'ultimate' compilation cds which seemed to contain about almost exclusively visualbasic stuff. It had a MULTI-LINGUAL MENU INTERFACE WITH SPEECH

Softkey did some weird stuff...

I also have a 40 Games Softkey CD, but when I was really young I found it odd that, for a CD that was only supposed to have 40 games on it, the games were split across two sections each requiring a special password to access. When I went looking through the CD's file structure it actually had compressed files for MANY more programs! All password locked of course. :P

Then, much later in life, I took the EXE files on the CD into a hex editor and discovered not one, not two, not three, but SEVERAL DOZEN different passwords, all in plain text. XD

Most of them only produced selections of 6 programs or games, some only produced a single program.

So it seems what Softkey did was make a ton of the exact same CD and just market it with different packaging and passwords. Smooth. :P

I kind of came across this thread accidentally and kind of feel rude asking, but is there a way for any of you guys to upload a catalogue of the games on each disk somewhere?

I ask because I remember having a copy of Nothing But Action, but I don't know where it's gone and have been looking for some of the really weird games on there on the wide ol' web.

I used to have a few of these CDs as well, though I lost most of them over the years. 😜 I remember having a Gold Star Compilation of some sort, countless E-Games compilations, and one by this company that had a logo suspiciously similar to the one used by American Megatrends. 🤣

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

American Megatrends

Capstone?

There's a wonderful resource on the topic!
http://cd.textfiles.com/

leileilol wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

American Megatrends

Capstone?

That name rings a bell. Aren't they the same company that made Corridor 7?

EDIT: Just looked them up. They went out of business in 1996 and I remember this disk being published somewhere between 1997-1999, so it can't be them.

American Megatrends logo

Capstone logo

Looks pretty damn close to me.

Maybe my memory is just fuzzy. 🤣 But another thing I remember about this disc was that it had this intro FMV with like these golden gears and a pyramid or something, although I might be thinking of something else. 🤣

It might take alot of time, and I hope this is the right place for this:

http://www.udhq.org/dl/GAMES1000V2.tar

This is a shareware CD my father got me a *long* time ago at some random thrift store. It has alot of really bizarre unknown titles I can't find anywhere else. It also has demos of Chasm: The Rift, Descent and possibly other well known titles.

The problem with manually searching through the images is the fact the folders are named ID numbers to be used with the program that came with it... never tried to get the program installed but I think it might be a 16-bit program...

DracoNihil wrote:

It might take alot of time, and I hope this is the right place for this

For the long haul I thought "..not really..." and moved it here instead. Apologies.

I was just thinking about who may have made the shareware disc I had, and I'm thinking it may have actually been AzTech Multimedia, the same company that manufactured a bunch of Soundblaster-compatible cards in the 90s.

I remember this old "Southwest Softworks" something I think it went, it was blue floppys with a atypical typeface on a white sticker. The few diskettes my father had contained odd clones of Defender, Robotron and some space invaders clone\remake. I don't think we have the floppies anymore and I can't find the exact binaries of those games anywhere else...

Has anyone have any experience with this "Southwest Softworks" company?

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I was just thinking about who may have made the shareware disc I had, and I'm thinking it may have actually been AzTech Multimedia, the same company that manufactured a bunch of Soundblaster-compatible cards in the 90s.

Could be. They have definitely dabbled in shovelware discs with front ends. The only one I own is Aztech Super Games (1994) and that is just a Quikmenu frontend

I vaguely recall it having a frontend of some sort, though it was Windows based. Real shame that I lost it, along with the Gold Star compilation I had. There's just something about the experience of sifting through dozens of crappy games on a 90s shareware CD, hoping to find some forgotten gems. 🤣

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Maybe my memory is just fuzzy. 🤣 But another thing I remember about this disc was that it had this intro FMV with like these golden gears and a pyramid or something, although I might be thinking of something else. 🤣

Global Star had a shareware CD that had a opening FMV involving golden clockwerk gears. If I recall correctly that's the same CD that introduced me to Gunmetal of which I'm struggling to find a actual retail copy of that game at a affordable price...