shovelware on the internet-archive

[FireFish]

if this is not fit for this forum, please feel free to admin it because
even if the archive is mostly correct in its license claims, it is not always up to date with recent re-releases and re-authoring of content, nor does it always count on a global scale.

the internet archive, a massive operation that is attempting to save every website and content that is available on the internet since the 90's has a few interesting 'shovelware' doom content which they claim to be abandoned or licensed as free to distribute.

for those interested, the main doom shovelware page.
https://archive.org/details/doom-cds

the doom shovelware list :
https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Adoom-cds&sort=-publicdate

[Maes]

Always a good reminder. I dig the fact that you can download entire ISOs and burn actual CDs or just browse with your pace offline, rather than navigating through the CD's content online and having to download one file at a time.

FWIW, I'll mention that I;m trying to track down an elusive Doom shareware + WAD hybrid CD which also included a single CD-Audio track with a special rendition of E1M1. Maybe it's in there, somewhere?

[Gez]

There's also a few Doom-related shovelware ISOs among the lot here: http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html

[fraggle]

I think we've had threads about this before, but it's certainly worth repeating. The Internet archive is a great site, and even though shovelware CDs like this are a pretty obscure thing to be going to the trouble of archiving, I think it's great that they've done it anyway.

I've thought about writing some kind of script to automatically process all these old shovelware ISOs, extract the WAD files and document them somewhere. Plenty of them are probably junk but it would be interesting to see how many of them don't appear in the idgames archive.

Gez said:

There's also a few Doom-related shovelware ISOs among the lot here: http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html

I think this is the same collection. Jason Scott (owner of textfiles.com) is now employed by the IA.

[FireFish]

Maes said:

Always a good reminder. I dig the fact that you can download entire ISOs and burn actual CDs or just browse with your pace offline, rather than navigating through the CD's content online and having to download one file at a time.

FWIW, I'll mention that I;m trying to track down an elusive Doom shareware + WAD hybrid CD which also included a single CD-Audio track with a special rendition of E1M1. Maybe it's in there, somewhere?

they have a disc with the doom pic stamped on it, which claims to have 3 doom shareware version which you can play directly from the cd.

https://archive.org/details/cdrom-doom-accessories

the cd image :
https://ia600806.us.archive.org/0/items/cdrom-doom-accessories/doom_03.png

[Memfis]

Yeah, it would be great if you made a script like that fraggle! We need more of these charming 1994 wads. :)

[Zed]

fraggle said:

I think we've had threads about this before, but it's certainly worth repeating. The Internet archive is a great site, and even though shovelware CDs like this are a pretty obscure thing to be going to the trouble of archiving, I think it's great that they've done it anyway.

That's correct, the last one of those was in fact by me (now "buried" in page 7). Could it be a good idea to make a "special" thread (you know, like those ones that stay at the top, like the "trying to find a specific WAD") so people can keep uploading what they have? Some of us seem to have a couple of them not present in archive.org (I think I might have a couple, but I'm not sure).

[Boingo]

The first CD ROM I ever bought was a DooM shovelware anthology called "The DooMsday Collection". Oddly enough, I have not seen it in any lists of DooM shovelware.

[GreyGhost]

I know the one you mean, has very similar boxart to the Deathday Collection but about half I've seen on eBay seem to contain a different CD.

[Boingo]

That's the one. It appeared as DooMsday Collection first, then the name was changed in later editions. I assume it was some kind of copyright thing.

[Zed]

Hold on, is this DooMsday Collection the same as Deathday Collection?

[GreyGhost]

I hope not. I know Deathday Collection was republished by SoftKey as "The Ultimate Add On Collection for Doom / Doom II", but wasn't aware of a third incarnation of the CD.

[fraggle]

GreyGhost, from the look of Zed's previous thread it seems like you have quite an impressive collection of shovelware CDs, and I see you already put one of them up on archive.org when requested. Have you thought at all about putting the rest up there (those that are not already up there)?

[GreyGhost]

I'm planning to upload them. First making sure the iso images are readable on *nix boxes (one thing I didn't do with Doom Fever) and scanning stuff. Might be 46 going up if they'll also accept Heretic/Hexen disks.

[Bloodshedder]

GreyGhost said:

Might be 46 going up if they'll also accept Heretic/Hexen disks.

Do you have this one? (download in thread)

[GreyGhost]

I have, CD and inlays but not the box.

[Boingo]

Zed said:

Hold on, is this DooMsday Collection the same as Deathday Collection?

It must be. The box art is identical except for the name, which had "DOOMSDAY" written in big letters.

Here is my CD.

http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/4008/oy6t.jpg

And here is the start up screen

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/5742/ogty.png

It is where I got most of my early editing software in the days before I got the internet.

I did not even have a CDROM drive at the time I bought this. CDROMs were not yet standard on computers and cost about $400 to buy seperately (Today I can probably get a DVD R for about $20). My brother had a 486 computer with a CDROM drive in it, so I had to take the CD over to his place and spend hours figuring out which wads and programs I wanted to try and copying them over to 3.5" floppies to bring home.

[Grazza]

I'd just like to remove a possible point of confusion here, and to clarify why this is OK to post here, while warez/abandonwarez are not.

FireFish said:

interesting 'shovelware' doom content which they claim to be abandoned or licensed as free to distribute.

The reason why shovelware compilations are generally considered OK for third parties to archive and distribute is not that they were at some point subject to copyright and that they have subsequently become public domain or freeware. That is not the case in the vast majority of instances. The reason is that such copyright never existed in the first place. The shovelware makers grabbed freely distributable, publically-available files (and in those days they had a ready market among people who preferred to pay to get the stuff on disk in order to avoid the major hassle and expense of downloading large quantities of data on a dial-up connection).

If the files were freely distributable at that time, then they still are. The one remaining point is compilation copyright. That is, if a degree of thought and judgement went into the selection of files (e.g. "100 best wads, sorted and categorized"). It's a rather secondary form of copyright, but it does exist. However, if the files really have been indiscrimately "shovelled" (and thus shovelware), then this doesn't apply either.

[Boingo]

Grazza said:

(and in those days they had a ready market among people who preferred to pay to get the stuff on disk in order to avoid the major hassle and expense of downloading large quantities of data on a dial-up connection)

Let's not forget about the vast majority of users at the time who did not have the internet at all. Unlike today, very few users had access to the internet, and programs were bought in stores and shareware (like DooM) was traded on floppy disks. You did not simply download stuff off the net, because chances were you didn't have the internet, and if you did, it was probably just a connection to a local bulletin board server.

I would personally go into a store and buy a single shareware title on disk each week. Computer stores and dollar stores would have racks of sharwware titles, usually costing around $5.00 each, with the disclaimer that the price was for the cost of the disk and the copying of the program to the disk.

Shareware was actually a big thing for a few years.

Then when CDROMs became more common, the same people who created these shovelware collections also started piling shareware onto CDROMs instead of individual floppies. There would CDs proclaiming anywhere between 100 and 2000 shareware titles. DooM was pretty much manditory for all of them. I would call this shovelware too. even though it was shareware, it was just large amounts of shareware indescriminately dumped on to CDs by third party companies to make a quick dollar.

The resulting glut of shareware quickly killed off the shareware market. After all, why pay $30 for episodes 2-6 of Blake Stone after winning episode 1 when you can install and play another game with just one click?

[Doominator2]

kind of reminds me of those unlicensed Duke nukem 3d Shovelware Cd's

https://archive.org/details/cdrom-duke-assault
https://archive.org/details/cdrom-duke-zone

[Zed]

@Maes: Do you still have this one?

[GreyGhost]

Boingo said:

It must be. The box art is identical except for the name, which had "DOOMSDAY" written in big letters.

Here is my CD.

http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/4008/oy6t.jpg

Can you upload a directory listing of the CD? That's dir D:\ /s /o:gn > C:\DOOMsDAY.lst from the command prompt (assuming D:\ is your optical drive), if you're starting to forget the DOS commands. Or run you eye down this zipped listing from Deathday Collection.

[fraggle]

Boingo said:

Let's not forget about the vast majority of users at the time who did not have the internet at all. Unlike today, very few users had access to the internet, and programs were bought in stores and shareware (like DooM) was traded on floppy disks. You did not simply download stuff off the net, because chances were you didn't have the internet, and if you did, it was probably just a connection to a local bulletin board server.

Yeah, these shovelware CDs served a really useful purpose back in the '90s when it simply wasn't practical to download things over a 33.6k baud modem. Only problem in the case of the WAD shovelware CDs was their universal lack of respect for copyright and the authors' wishes. I guess it was a pretty safe assumption that nobody was going to go to the trouble of suing them for doing it, given that the authors were just individuals and not companies (think - if they did the same with commercial games, it would have been called piracy).

[IMX]

I remember downloading all of 'em at one point over the past four weeks. It's like 12GB of stuff.

Also you can download every single disc contained in each article in a zipped file by just changing the "details" in the url with "compress".

[dg93]

Memfis said:

We need more of these charming 1994 wads. :)

Lol I have never stumbled across any good 1994 wads on /idgames throughout my years of playing doom. However, the typical bad map designs and ugly texture offsets are somewhat charming in some 1994 wads. It just comes to show you have there weren't many authors back in the day who knew what hell to do :P

[GreyGhost]

Not much has changed. Fortunately, these days the bad designs tend to be smothered by multiple layers of decorative but redundant detailing. :P

[dg93]

GreyGhost said:

Not much has changed. Fortunately, these days the bad designs tend to be smothered by multiple layers of decorative but redundant detailing. :P

I agree with that. In my opinion, a good amount of modern Doom deathmatch wads have greatly improved since the end of the 90's. However, many modern day single player wads tend to have lots of bad textures and thing placements. Like you start off with a pistol in MAP01 and you are ambushed by like 30+ ememies.. wtf lol