I did the same. 😁 Those mags were crazy.

swaaye wrote:

they got deleted. not much interest anyway.

Fortunately I downed them all before they were zapped. I think.

The PC Gamers were of highest interest to me. You'll be surprised at how many Windows shareware sites don't even host games from the '90s anymore (gamesdomain, happypuppy, sunet.se to name a few) The PC Gamer demo discs are oodles of useful for that area since they often pack the original archives, and CGW on the other hand provided them already extracted which made that annoying (until 2000, they just left it intact)

And if there's any other mid-to-late 90s cds that plonk random shareware/freeware from the internet, not just the mainstream AAA titles... let me know! The 16-bit era is already starting to look more preserved than that 95-99 32-bit one... mainly because even later shovelware collections focused quantity over quality, so 1000 win16 games look more impressive than 200 win32 games, or something like that.

I grabbed all of the discs while they were up - so if anyone else needs one let me know and I can make it available somewhere.

I would love to get my hands on more if anyone has discs they can share. The full versions of programs/games are easy to find - but the shareware, and demo files are quickly disappearing. Especially files which were not included on "shovelware" CDs. The big download sites today only carry the most recent files.

I have mounds of demo disks. I was ripping all my PC Gamer CDs from 1997 when I noticed 1 of the 12 CDs were missing. 😢 Then I just stopped...

Think PC Gamer would hunt me down and shoot me if I were to put them up?
Guess I could just put up all the demo and such separately, nothing wrong in distributing shareware. I was once in the process of making a web sever at home to host old game demos and utilities but then Comcast put a cap on my bandwidth, and that was all of that. Then I joined VOGONS.

I've collected mounds of demos from both my CGW cds and download.com, so far amassed at 13.5gb, stopped when I reached January 2000 (it seems at that precise month it started turning into MODERNPUZZLESHAREWAREMANIA that is too well recycled)

Unfortunately none of this 13.5gb of demos have any independent '90s freeware. It's like the only freeware game that's ever preserved it seems is Liero 1.33!

swizzle: I wouldn't mind grabbing those. If you wouldn't mind upping them somewhere. Please!!

😊

Hello.
I was wondering if any of the older pc gamer demo discs could be uploaded somewhere?
I have been searching for them for so long.
I really, really want to hear the coocaloo bird again, and of course the original coconut monkey.

I put all of them up on Underground Gamer. But you need an invite so PM me for one.

Hey, sorry to bump the old topic -- but better than starting a new one, I figure! Keep it all in one place.

Is there a chance that someone could repost the 6-95 CD-Rom Today disc somewhere? I did have this at one point, but it seems to have gone missing. I would greatly appreciate it.

I still have the CD.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/bicfo9ynxu6 … ay_06-95.7z.001
http://www.mediafire.com/download/rpg0761d7dd … ay_06-95.7z.002

I hope you guys realize that not everything on a magazine CD/floppy was public domain. Some stuff was released under license from the copyright holder and it wouldn't be legal to distribute that stuff. Without knowing what is still copyrighted and what isn't, you're asking for trouble.

I'm still hoping to find Battle (by Bullfrog) one day, from a 1992 issue of PC Review.

Thanks so much, swaaye!

sliderider wrote:

I hope you guys realize that not everything on a magazine CD/floppy was public domain. Some stuff was released under license from the copyright holder and it wouldn't be legal to distribute that stuff. Without knowing what is still copyrighted and what isn't, you're asking for trouble.

Totally. In my case I do physically own this disc. I just haven't the foggiest where it actually got to. I had a subscription to this thing for a big hunk of its run.

sliderider wrote:

I hope you guys realize that not everything on a magazine CD/floppy was public domain. Some stuff was released under license from the copyright holder and it wouldn't be legal to distribute that stuff. Without knowing what is still copyrighted and what isn't, you're asking for trouble.

While this is true no one cares about copyright when it comes to old magazine CDs from mid to late 90is.
The same hold true for old driver CDs. There are often full versions of random old utilitys on them.

Where do you draw the line?
Do we even have the right to host drivers?
Bundled full version games is where I draw the line, those are not for sharing.
If you think you do not have the right to use an utility on one of those magazine/driver cds then dont use it.

I noticed that Archive.org has a bunch of CDROM Today CD images. They have quite a lot of magazine and shareware ÇDs. Not the issue that was requested by fnoo though.

Whoa. So they do. Problem is, there's no easy way to tell what's on these CDs. For some of them, maybe a side search will turn up a software list. For most, though, you just have to download the thing and sift through. Which... is doable, I guess. But if one were looking for something in particular, it could be a little problematic.

Still, great that they're there. Maybe someone can toss 'em in a relational database one day.

The Internet Archive seeks to do just that. Honestly, if anyone has these discs, upload them to the Archive! Don't forget the textfiles CD archive as well: http://cd.textfiles.com/

fnoo wrote:

Whoa. So they do. Problem is, there's no easy way to tell what's on these CDs..

They tend to upload first, finesse the user interface later.

Try the ZIP viewer if the contents are compressed in a ZIP by adding a / to the end of the download link. I refer to this hack here. (There's probably a way to do that from the web interface, but I don't know it yet.)
Re: Preservation of historical ftp site content

Right. cd.textfies.com has been intensely valuable, especially for those discs where the files are uncompressed -- meaning I can just search for individual file names and file types. I've found a bunch of software and resources this way. Where the discs contain a bunch of zip files, it's time consuming enough to download everything and sort through that I often don't bother. It would be nice to have an easy web utility to peek into files without grabbing them. Maybe a Chrome plugin. I can see how that could work...

EDIT: Oh, maybe this could be useful?

http://lifehacker.com/5821902/view-zip-and-ra … handy-extension