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Garbo archive

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First post, by snorg

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So I downloaded the whole Garbo freeware/shareware archive today. Thought it would be insanely huge but it was only 1GB.
Of course I wouldn't have had room for all that stuff way back in the early 90s. Now I can stick it on a spare SD card.
Anyone know if someone backed up the Simtel archive?

Are there any other caches of stuff you miss?

Reply 1 of 23, by JayCeeBee64

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I miss ftp.cdrom.com. Used to go there frequently in the late 90s to download all sorts of stuff - Doom WADs, shareware games, midis, tracker files (MOD and S3M mostly), wallpaper images, game patches & updates, etc. While most of its content has survived elsewhere, it just doesn't feel the same.

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 2 of 23, by leileilol

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I missed sunet.se as well. And HappyPuppy, GamesDomain, Gamehead, 3dgamers.org, 3dfiles, etc... 😜

HappyPuppy was useful since they went out of their way to list about every game out there no matter how obscure it was (as well as Lord Soth's multiplayer games list)- which lead me to games found only hosted on (not surviving) AOL pages. Sadly its shark jumping happened in 1998.

Last edited by leileilol on 2014-03-25, 13:32. Edited 1 time in total.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 3 of 23, by sliderider

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I miss the old days of downloading as many files as possible from Compuserve. Shareware/freeware versions of games always seemed to pop up there sooner or later. Of course, you would end up with massive telephone and usage bills if you downloaded too much in a short space of time so you had to be careful.

Reply 4 of 23, by MrFlibble

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Recently I discovered that a substantial part of the files from cdrom.com, ftp.sunet.se and a few other file archives from the 90s has been preserved by the Wayback Machine via their HTML mirrors:

o GamesDomain file archive from 1997 (ftp.sunet.se): http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/gamesdomain/
Many files larger than 10 MiB have not been preserved but a lot of files are still accessible.

o PC Game World file archive (ftp.sunet.se): http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/pcgameworld/demos/

o umich.edu: http://www.umich.edu/~archive/msdos/games/

o wuarchive.wustl.edu: http://web.archive.org/web/19961227105925/htt … _UPLOADS/games/

o funet.fi: http://www.funet.fi/pub/msdos/games/

o cdrom.com has some areas preserved: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/games/abuse/

o MS-DOS area @ iNF Dresden: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cdrom … om/pub/dresden/*

Notable highlights:

o PC World Online's FTP: http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/games/

Notable highlights:

o Gamesmania Demo Depot

Notable highlights:

o Games/Terra (apparently some Brazilian site).

Notable highlights:

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 6 of 23, by xjas

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I miss ftpsearch.ntnu.no (and why do I still remember that URL to this day??) It did exactly what you think it does - search every anonymous FTP site it could find. And it was *really* good.

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Reply 7 of 23, by lightmaster

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I remember it too, you still remember probably coz it was so useful!! it's preserved in web.archive.org/web too.

Last edited by lightmaster on 2016-03-04, 20:30. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 8 of 23, by keropi

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xjas wrote:

I miss ftpsearch.ntnu.no (and why do I still remember that URL to this day??) It did exactly what you think it does - search every anonymous FTP site it could find. And it was *really* good.

I use this for nay ftp searches I need to do: http://www.mmnt.ru/int/ , worked for me for several occasions

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Reply 10 of 23, by MrFlibble

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Here's a seemingly obscure FTP with some possibly interesting stuff:
ftp://tardis.ursa.org/pub/BBS%20Archives/

Found it via this FTP search engine (haven't used it before).

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 12 of 23, by MrFlibble

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I just found another old site which has some of its file archived preserved by the Wayback Machine: The Gamer's Inn. It was listed here. Some notable highlights:

Last edited by MrFlibble on 2017-06-22, 12:27. Edited 1 time in total.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 14 of 23, by MrFlibble

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It appears that the Future Shock demo preserved by The Gamer's Inn is v0.142, as opposed v0.144 which has been found earlier (available here for example). These two releases are only several hours apart (the difference is in SHOCK.EXE), I guess there was some last-minute bug fixing involved.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 15 of 23, by appiah4

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@MrFlibble you are the man. Only yesterday I tried to log on to ftp.sunet.se and realized it was shut down (10 years too late? I wouldn't know). Today, I am a happy man.

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Reply 17 of 23, by MrFlibble

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Here's a little something found by another user: a partially preserved German BBS w/ shareware downloads:
http://www.vobis.de:80/bbs/ari/files/index.htm

Not all game downloads were archive by the Wayback Machine but here's a few interesting ones:

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 18 of 23, by MrFlibble

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Looks like there's a German version of Ford Simulator specifically featuring Ford Fiesta (ford.zip), which is kind of similar to the original thing but actually has different graphics:
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DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games