First post, by dumpsterac1d
- Rank
- Newbie
For background, I wanted to do a retrospective/shareware limited release series on floppy, starting with Softdisk's Carmack/Romero/Carmack games. Oddly enough, I remember games like Rescue Rover, Catacomb 2, and Keen far more than any of their other games, so wanted to highlight that period and do a small writeup, do a micro-run of colored 5.25 1.2m floppies and the rest standard black, do some custom printing, and create a more sophisticated install menu with a lot of information and context surrounding the release.
I'm running into difficulties understanding the licenses which certain titles were distributed. For example, I know concretely that my family did not order Hovertank 3D, however we did have a professionally printed disk containing a few levels, as my grandmother was a member of a ton of shareware distros between 1987-1993. The only games we bought back in the day were Keens 1-6. For the life of me, I cannot find any information on a shareware issue of Hovertank, just that it and a few other Gamer's Edge releases have been Open Sourced.
Another huge gaping question is the first Catacomb (the Gauntlet clone). I initially thought this game was Shareware, then when I found no information on its license I assumed for about 2 years I couldn't put it on the compilation. Researching yesterday and looking through the files on Archive.org however I find that the version they have is actually a Verbatim periodical disk that explicitly tells people to copy the disk.
So now I'm even more confused- were some titles licensed differently depending on deals made to certain shareware distros? Or if one (i guess notably legal) shareware distro put a game on a disk with no other information available, does that mean I'd be good to do that too?
Before GOG, I don't think I'd have any moral quandary about putting Catacomb on a disk, but considering they're selling a pack with it in there, I want to be sure. I also think that highlighting shareware as a concept is important for this series so I don't want to mistakenly put full versions of stuff (even if it is "abandonware") on disk.
Also, it seems that it's easier to find disk images for complete games than their shareware counterparts. Which is entirely reasonable, but I'm a little perturbed that I'm having such a hard time finding exactly what was distributed as shareware without personally downloading disk images and rummaging through the contents, and even that can be ambiguous, considering the Catacomb issue above.
I initially thought I could go to a shareware website and just pull things from there, however there are tons of sites and almost none of them have more than 3 games for softdisk in their shareware section.
Is there a list out there? Or some way of getting accurate information about there being shareware versions of games? What do you recommend, trawling ebay and archive for shareware disks from the time and digging through their contents? Is there any better place to get this info?
