A long time ago, I acquired a set of 6 DOS shareware CD-ROMs from a company called White Wolf Software:
Click for larger image
Eventually, I wondered if I could find some more and I purchased a lot of them on eBay that contained 16 more. At first, I thought maybe they were periodical, but I noticed that they were all published in 1995. Each disc contains 10 different shareware titles. According to the above photo, they used to ask a fairly high price (US$13). It’s unlikely that these discs have any software that isn’t represented elsewhere on the Archive. I think the most interesting thing about these discs is the amount of graphic design effort that went into the cover art. Also, pay particular attention to the cover of #29: Commander Keen IV— I strongly suspect that the youngster represented on the cover was the child of someone involved in the production of the disc series.
At long last, I finally got around to extracting the ISO-9660 filesystems, scanning all the cover art artifacts, and uploading them to the Internet Archive. If you are interested, click through the link to see which 10 programs are on each CD-ROM. I spent a lot of effort to document the contents of each distro, linking to MobyGames when the program is a game that is represented in the database.
Also, the reason I had put off the final uploading was because I still needed to scan all of the cover art artifacts (CD-ROMs and jewel case matter), and then straighten and crop each scan. This latter step is the most tedious. I finally got around to creating a new tool specifically to accelerate this process called MobyCAIRO. Hopefully, it will help reduce the friction for future submissions.
- Series 4
- Series 5
- Series 6
- Series 7
- Series 9
- Series 11
- Series 13
- Series 15
- Series 16
- Series 17
- Series 18
- Series 20
- Series 21
- Series 22
- Series 23
- Series 24
- Series 25
- Series 28
- Series 29
- Series 30
- Series 34
- Series 36
Including the Series 3 disc already on the Archive, there are 23 discs of the series uploaded. There are at least 36 total.
Other Items
A few other items I have tossed up on the archive recently:
- NAMCO 2004 Marketing Kit: This is a video DVD and a CD-ROM. After I finally got this uploaded, I realized there was another copy up on the Archive already. That contributor even went through the bother of scanning each of the marketing cards in the kit, even through they are represented on the CD-ROM as PDFs.
- Starbright Athsma CD-ROM Game: Quest for the Code: I covered this a long time ago on this blog (one of the last times I played a game and wrote it up for this blog).
Developing MobyCAIRO | Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes says:
[…] On A Solution Recently, I was determined to get a set of old shareware games archived. I ripped the data a year ago but I was blocked on the scanning task because I knew that would also […]