Dracolich wrote on 2021-11-20, 23:53:

I remember spending a long time (few years actually) on-and-off searching for the Windows version of the Dilbert Afterdark screensaver by Delrina. I came across the Mac version easily enough, and that was nice for my System 7.6 VM in SheepShaver, but the Windows version was extremely elusive. I think I finally found it on one of those personal ftp's. Lol As the OP says, the chase is part of the fun. In my various searches for games and some office software I hit REMOVED pretty hard.
One thing I haven't found yet is .ima floppy images of the 1993 version of Stronghold by SSI. A .zip of the preinstalled game is easy enough to find, but not images of the original floppies. For me part of the fun is installing the games with their original installer programs 😀
Another thing that seems to have disappeared is the Second Nature Slideshow screensaver collections. That's my favorite wallpaper program for Windows 3.x. I still have my disks for the sets I bought back in the day. But nowadays, besides the sampler set, I rarely find any on the archive sites. I always wanted the Applejack Wolf Family set but haven't found it.

I too have been searching the internet for Second Nature screensavers. In around 1994 my brother bought me a Second Nature screensaver collection that was space art. It was beautiful. I had Win 3.1 at the time. A few years later I found Second Nature was still making screen savers and I was able to update my version to run on Windows XP. However about 10 years ago I moved to the UK and couldn't take much with me and I have lost my original disk(s) for that Second Nature collection and now that I have purchased a very nice retro P-III (3Dfx Voodoo 3 included!) I am trying so hard to find that collection again but only a few Second Nature collections are out there that I can find.... Anyone seen the space art one?

Drivers for the old Targa video capture cards (or compatible software/ demo disks)

I've had so many hunts for crap for these old machines.....it seems I perpetually have them....

I think my longest chase yet has been that isometric house-builder program for DOS or Windows 3.1 I remember a friend having on his gateway 2000 as a kid circa 1993. It was very cartooney and not meant as a serious CAD program like say, 3D Home Architect.

For the longest time I chased Maxit.bas and Depthchg.bas - two BASIC games my sister had on her 386 that I freakin' loved, then they turned up on some of the BBS archives on cd.textfiles.com. Now they're a permanant fixture on most of my machines, generally favoring them on the 286 and Tandy since they look/run the best on those. Maxit was a game where you navigated a grid of numbers, "grabbing" them for a score, and whoever got the highest score wins. Depthchg.bas was DepthCharge by Henry J. Kotler, which looked like WordPerfect 5.1 creating a submarine-fight out of ASCII characters. Possibly one of the most underrated simple games for DOS ever.

A lot of the chase was getting AAA titles I already owned. I remember spending 2 hours on 56K dial-up getting Ultima VI over an AOL connection from a russian site because Disk4 died. Luckily I found the Ultima collection on CD at a pawn shop later (same version I'm still using today). Then there was getting my hands on Freddy Pharkas, and all that I could find was the Talkie on ISO format (I had the non-talkie) after 3 disks went bad. I pretty much tied up my 768K DSL for awhile on that one. These were back in the early days of abandonware before ESB protections and before GOG (the Home of the Underdogs days).

Then there was that time I got my hands on a MediaVision ProGraphics 1280 VLB card and chased after the drivers, until a guy from VCFED found them and sent them to me via PM. Turns out the card was bad - sheesh. Actually, Mediavision has been kind of my nemesis when it comes to hardware and drivers in general, I had something from them recently drive me insane trying to find it.

For a long time I also had a DV Capture card for my 486, one of those Packard Bell Reveal jobbies, and for the longest time, there was a Packard Bell fansite that had the drivers. Well....those are long gone now (so is the card). Last time I went looking for them all I could find was drivers for Windows 98.

When I got my NEC Versas...well, you could get the manuals from NEC's support site, but their FTP went down sometime in 2019. Apparently then the FTP was uploaded to 2 places and I spent six months between Vogons, Internet Archive, and elsewhere looking for them, finally to nab the entire 6GB FTP from Archive.org and guard it. I'm actually planning to use my Geocities.ws account to make a large download site for this stuff and actually put it all together correctly and curate it properly.

Shoot, I've still got some edutainment software from my school days I'd love to swipe up, he had some kind of game that I thought was oregon trail, but is not, and I think you could walk around almost FPS style in the old west or something. I wish I could remembe rit. There was also some weird science program, probably an IBM Education thing, that had a bike race in it that everyone wanted to play all the darned time. I just dug up Linkway Live....that was my favorite pixel-art program before "pixel-art" even had a name. I used to design all the school's login screen artwork on that.

Anyone have the latest (or later) drivers available from Canopus for the Pure3D Voodoo 6MB? All I have is the original CD, which matches the version found at Vogonsdrivers. I've been looking for who knows how long...

That Daleks game (Dr. Who) for Windows 2.x..
Lost it a few years ago, along with my sonic screwdriver..
Can't find it again ever since..

Jo22 wrote on 2022-01-21, 15:25:

That Daleks game (Dr. Who) for Windows 2.x..
Lost it a few years ago, along with my sonic screwdriver..
Can't find it again ever since..

Itll be where you left the screwdriver !!

2sekunds wrote on 2022-01-20, 18:08:

I too have been searching the internet for Second Nature screensavers. In around 1994 my brother bought me a Second Nature screensaver collection that was space art. It was beautiful. I had Win 3.1 at the time. A few years later I found Second Nature was still making screen savers and I was able to update my version to run on Windows XP. However about 10 years ago I moved to the UK and couldn't take much with me and I have lost my original disk(s) for that Second Nature collection and now that I have purchased a very nice retro P-III (3Dfx Voodoo 3 included!) I am trying so hard to find that collection again but only a few Second Nature collections are out there that I can find.... Anyone seen the space art one?

I downloaded the entire archive over a decade ago and threw it on an old Samsung Story 1.5TB drive. I just found it and if anyone is interested, let me know.

SimbaSeven wrote on 2024-01-16, 00:52:

2sekunds wrote on 2022-01-20, 18:08:

I too have been searching the internet for Second Nature screensavers. In around 1994 my brother bought me a Second Nature screensaver collection that was space art. It was beautiful. I had Win 3.1 at the time. A few years later I found Second Nature was still making screen savers and I was able to update my version to run on Windows XP. However about 10 years ago I moved to the UK and couldn't take much with me and I have lost my original disk(s) for that Second Nature collection and now that I have purchased a very nice retro P-III (3Dfx Voodoo 3 included!) I am trying so hard to find that collection again but only a few Second Nature collections are out there that I can find.... Anyone seen the space art one?

I downloaded the entire archive over a decade ago and threw it on an old Samsung Story 1.5TB drive. I just found it and if anyone is interested, let me know.

Just upload it on the archive or here. Somebody wanting these may not want to post.

I've recently been looking for version 1.x of the classic Mac flight sim F/A-18 Hornet. There are a lot of different versions that have been released.

It's easy enough the find the classic version (confusing enough listed as v1.1.2 in the game itself) and F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 can be thought of as both a sequel and an upgrade to v1.x (although not an upgrade to the classic version, yes, v confusing). The classic version isn't compatible with the last couple of beta patches for v1.x.

I'm hoping if I can find it I can patch it to the latest patch and create a definitive edition of F/A-18 Hornet v1.1.3b2.

SimbaSeven wrote on 2024-01-16, 00:52:

2sekunds wrote on 2022-01-20, 18:08:

I too have been searching the internet for Second Nature screensavers. In around 1994 my brother bought me a Second Nature screensaver collection that was space art. It was beautiful. I had Win 3.1 at the time. A few years later I found Second Nature was still making screen savers and I was able to update my version to run on Windows XP. However about 10 years ago I moved to the UK and couldn't take much with me and I have lost my original disk(s) for that Second Nature collection and now that I have purchased a very nice retro P-III (3Dfx Voodoo 3 included!) I am trying so hard to find that collection again but only a few Second Nature collections are out there that I can find.... Anyone seen the space art one?

I downloaded the entire archive over a decade ago and threw it on an old Samsung Story 1.5TB drive. I just found it and if anyone is interested, let me know.

I have been looking for these too can you please let me know where to get them from you?

I've been looking for an old Hypercard Mac game called Name That Guitarist for 10 years. I've scoured the internet and even reached out to the developer. I've found files but cannot get it to run in any environment I tried. I don't think it was released in a box, likely a disk in a sleeve IIRC. I'm sure I'd play it once and regret spending time finding it again, but...

A lot of software I used to work with back in the day, particularly associated with Banyan VINES, which we re-sold. Some versions of VINES have been recovered, but several others are missing, specifically VINES 4.10 and 4.11, which were the first versions to fully support Windows 3.0 and 3.1. Other missing versions are VINES 3.1, VINES 2.xx and the 286 version. Versions of VINES for Banyan's 680x0 based servers is also missing, but the chances of finding any of those servers themselves is unlikely, as most would have been traded-in via various trade-in plans.

Also missing are the many patches and maintenance releases, which were made available on Banyan's own FTP site, and mirrored to at least one other. A few survive, but a lot are missing.

Missing completely is ENS for Netware, a system which allowed Netware clients to use Banyan's StreetTalk. The SDK is also lost - this would be very helpful in trying to get VINES to run on more modern hardware. Also missing are the various VINES ports for other Unix variants, such as SCO Unix and Solaris, although some of those sold very little, if at all.

There's also a lot of Banyan's other software missing, such as their various tools for using NT servers as part of a VINES network. I've found one installation of StreetTalk for NT, but it's unstable due to missing patches.

Then there's the various network tools and other software from other long-forgotten vendors. Calendaring tools, RDBMSs, monitoring tools, gateways, and all kinds of other stuff, mostly from long forgotten companies.

That's the kind of thing you used to see taped up in bricks of 25 floppies in the late 90s Computer Fairs, "Ex Software Disks, good to reformat, $5"

For years (a decade? more?) I've been scouring the internet for old BBS software, source codes, keygens (from original authors after projects were abandoned of course), and door games. The door games are the most interesting to me as of right now. There are so many out there and such variety, it's a fun little rabbit hole, but I occasionally discover something new, so the search continues!

I've been on the search of a Dr.Sbaitso-like program called "Al Anis". The program is in Arabic. It had a dark red background and white text. It wasn't a talkie program, but it was very similar to how Dr.Sbaitso discussed matters. I used to have it on my XT PC, and it was on one 360KB disk, so it's a tiny program. It required loading the Arabic system TSR (Al Nafitha), which I do have. Al Nafitha was also bundled with the Arabic Windows for Workgroups 3.11, as it was a very accepted standard for enabling Arabic in otherwise non-Arabic programs like Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase iii.
Anyways, I'm still looking for Al Anis... maybe someday?

cloverskull wrote on 2024-11-25, 23:42:

For years (a decade? more?) I've been scouring the internet for old BBS software, source codes, keygens (from original authors after projects were abandoned of course), and door games. The door games are the most interesting to me as of right now. There are so many out there and such variety, it's a fun little rabbit hole, but I occasionally discover something new, so the search continues!

Like LoRD, LotGD, and Usurper?? I remember I had my own local LoRD instance running.
I assume you know about breakintochat.com?

@ldeveraux yep! Those games 😀 And yeah I know about that site, I've visited it regularly. I actually run a couple linux BBSes and have my favorite doorgames set up on them. Linux native doors back in the day were hardly a thing though so the bulk of games are run in a DOS emulator.

cloverskull wrote on 2024-11-26, 16:19:

@ldeveraux yep! Those games 😀 And yeah I know about that site, I've visited it regularly. I actually run a couple linux BBSes and have my favorite doorgames set up on them. Linux native doors back in the day were hardly a thing though so the bulk of games are run in a DOS emulator.

Oh fun, I haven't set up even a local BBS in ~30 years.

I'm in search for Intel mocrocode BIOS updater software for old IBM Aptiva models with Pentium II/Celeron processors. If I recall correctly, it must be similar to this one: Re: Pentium 3 doesn't work on Pentium 2 motherboard Of course this Siemens-Nixdorf (Fudjitsu-Siemens) CPU microcode updater software refuses to work with my Aptiva board's BIOS.

Two spring to mind from my college days:

Samna Pro (or Samna Word maybe), the version we used was from before Lotus took it over and made it into AMI Pro. From what I can gather there was a DOS version of it though we only used it on AIX. There are two versions of it either with or without the ability to do spreadsheets (sort of) the one we used had the spreadsheet ability. I say sort of because I once opened a spreadsheet on 3 different terminals (we were using dumb terminals hooked up to a 6150 at the time) in a row and got 3 different set of results, frustrating as it sounds.

Integrated 7 Advanced released by Mosaic Software from what I recall. Never found anything about it on-line, its like the product never existed. A basic integrated package of the usual wp, spreadsheet, database and so on. DOS based but I have no details beyond that.

Why we were using such obscure software and not something someone had at least heard of is beyond me.