Shovelware Philosophical Pondering

[Michael Jensen]

On 4/29/2023 at 10:32 AM, thestarrover said:

if you are interested in historical files on idgames there are three "test" wads by Drake O'Brien: newdoor.wad, litefx.wad and strafe.wad.

Nothing playable but only demos on doors, lighting and gameplay.

 

spcial12.zip

Now this is exciting! Thank you very much. 

[thestarrover]

Since @Andromeda requested a download link for these files in this post , I’m putting here the files. Maybe someone else is interested in these files too.

Be aware that this is just a curiosity and these files have, perhaps, a purely historical value.

 

In August 1996, a repackaged version of Eternal Doom I was released by the GDI Team on a, probably ,German BBS.

The original Eternal.zip has been split into five zip archives and a self extracting installer has been included to rebuild the original package.

Once extracted, eternres.wad is ready to use and does not require installation with deusf. However, being pre-installed, to play it on ms-dos/Dosbox you need to edit eternal.cfg according to your system (eternal.cfg is automatically created during the installation).

 

I found the five archives on a warez cd and I can’t share a direct link.

The zip archive below includes only the essential (originals and untouched) files.  All the useless .com and .exe files are not included.

Although there are many wads, especially for the first Doom, released on wares CDs , it's the first time I've found an alternative release for such a famous megawad for Doom 2 on these kind of discs.

 

Edited November 3, 2023 by thestarrover

[prfunky]

On 4/27/2023 at 12:37 AM, CAM-7EA said:

This is why I think everyone should put a text file in their uploads so that author credit doesn’t get lost over time. There’s tons of levels from the mid to late 90s that have no information included. 

I've always included a "readme.txt" file with my WADs in the form of:

myfile.zip -> yields myfile.wad & myfile.txt

However, I found it really easy for the text file to get "lost". First, it was this certain

wad archive site which shut down the other year. I had bitch session with the

operator of the site and I don't feel bad about it either. His/her logic was he/she

was using some form of web-scraping automation to compile the site with really

no regard for "what" was being archived.

 

The other avenue of lost text files is the distribution of files via Doomseeker or

whatever ZDaemon's getwad program is called. I've come to appreciate that

automation myself being primarily a deathmatch Doom player as well as a

deathmatch author. When I first witnessed it nearly 2 decades ago with ZDaemon,

I thought it was just magic! Nowadays, I appreciate it as my number one form

of wad distribution of my own work. But recognizing this divorce of the text files

from the wads they go with had me thinking about what to do about it. As a total

digital neat-freak nerd, I can't tell you how many times I'd done the google search

just to fish out of somewhere the text file of somebody else's work. As an author,

I thought I had no control over what someone else decides to do with their

documentation until...

 

I discovered WADINFO. Bwauuugghhhhh! Now I'm conscious to provide both

the text file inside the zip as always but to duplicate that text into the WADINFO

lump added to the actual file. It's almost like self-documenting code!