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First post, by commodorejohn

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It is as the title says. For some time now I've been collecting those old shareware compilation discs from thrift stores. I'm doing this partly because it takes me back to the days of getting our first PC-compatible and my penny-pinching dad getting us some of these so that we'd have some games to play without having to shell out MSRP for any of the big-name titles, but also because, while hypothetically any given one of the games therein might still be kicking around on the Internet (and many still are, thankfully,) it's getting harder and harder these days to find the more obscure stuff. (I actually had to track down the exact CD we used to have in order to find one particular title!) So I've been wondering of late if I shouldn't make an effort to share these with other people who might be interested. Does anybody have any suggestions re: this? I know that organizations like TOSEC exist, but I don't know if they'd be interested in just a mass donation of a dozen-ish CDs full of shareware versions of games or not.

Reply 1 of 7, by mr_bigmouth_502

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I used to enjoy rooting through old shareware compilations, checking out obscure little games from small or defunct developers, though it's not been something I've done in years.

Reply 4 of 7, by Beegle

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Love those shareware CDs. I uploaded a couple here if you want them.
BBS Compilation on CD and other Shareware/Demo compilations

Let me know if some of the links stopped working.

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Youtube Channel : The Sound Card Database

Reply 5 of 7, by leileilol

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I am usually interested just to hunt a couple of obscure reclusives, but typuically they're the same laundry list of Apogee / Epic / Moraff / Soleau / MVP / Tommy's Toys stuff plus a load of <1995 Visualbasic Windows gaming filler.

Also typically shareware cds ignore everything that came after 1996 and even steer clear of later freeware titles - even some of the CD's from 1997-99 contain only 1995 latest stuff...with a newer sponsored bundle of something (usually AOL). Softkey poops out a lot of them eh

Shareware CDs from Europe and Asia might be more lax on what they include outside of the ASP clique so perhaps there's a higher chance of lost rarity there.

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long live PCem

Reply 6 of 7, by Jo22

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Yep, and I do also collect shareware CDs for the aforementioned reasons.
Sometimes they come with nice things, like old articles or Amiga modules.
Besides, not everything is available on the net yet. So it's also kind of a preservation thing.
I've got a lot of respect for everyone who takes the trouble to search for those CDs or keep them in an already crowded house. 😎

But really, there's a lot of not so popular applications softwhere and games you can find on them but not the web.
Or can you find this game online, for example (hope you don't 😉 ) ?

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