LGR - 1998 PC Gamer Resource Kit

cdrom.com was one of the big ftp sites in the 90s. It's where I used to get demos of various 90s games like Doom and Quake, among other things. They were an official mirror for a lot of things, including ID games, and yeah they made money primarily by allowing you to pick stuff off their ftp and have it pressed onto a CD and shipped to you, because dialup.

Dizzy

I've made a backup for my own purposes as usual, but I haven't uploaded it anywhere yet. Will post on Twitter or add to the video description if I do! And yeah YouTube has blocked them from ads but I'm disputing it before it goes pubic. We'll see what happens :)

LGR

Hi Clint, me again (sorry). Seeing as the contents on that 2nd CD-ROM are almost certainly entirely gone from the Internet now, might you consider taking a half hour from your day to make and upload somewhere an image of the disk? Yes I can buy a copy but it's going to cost me $40 to have a jewel case shipped here and not from the original publishers at that. I can not find it anywhere else. If you're not comfortable with doing so, even after hearing my desperate pleas, then I understand but I'm really keen to try to run those screensavers! Various builds of DOSBox are quite good at Glide / Voodoo graphics these days actually so I don't need to own the entire 3Dfx line to do so either! Cheers man. I saw that YouTube blocked the video in their infinite wisdom. If it doesn't get to go out then even fewer people will find out about this obscure period in computer graphics history. Is it the juju curse at play??

MagikGimp

Holly crap! I recently thought about the Theme Manager!

sufferd748

As for the 2nd disk, it seems to be files archived from 3Dfxmania.com, a site possibly owned by Walnut Creek. To say what WC made was free stuff isn't entirely accurate of course but a lot of it is considered vapour-ware these days which is why you can download much of it legally. 3Dfxmania became 3DFiles.com as other hardware and OpenGL, Direct3D etc came along. It was eventually bought by GameSpot, or whomever owned GS at the time, which might explain why the CD-ROMs are still for sale and not available for free on archives. You can see where they got the screensavers from, as an evidence of what I'm saying, by looking at the old page for them here- <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19980113205204/http://3dfxmania.com:80/screensaver.shtml" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/19980113205204/http://3dfxmania.com:80/screensaver.shtml</a> The filenames are the same and so are the descriptions, including "unknown"! Sadly a lot of the files themselves haven't been backed up (from WC's CDROM.com FTP server) but I'm trying to find them elsewhere. They're bound to be out there somewhere... I'll have to learn how to navigate the old BBSes; they're probably a good bet.

MagikGimp

Here is a (German) article about that: <a href="https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article649322/Karstadt-setzt-auf-Multimedia.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article649322/Karstadt-setzt-auf-Multimedia.html</a>

BastetFurry

Back in the mid-90s these where our main source of stuff because going online was expensive as hell. It was actually cheaper to go to the Cyberbar at Karstadt in Essen, hands up if any fellow German remembers that, than going online at home.

BastetFurry

Also, check this out *drools* <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160401054420/http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/multide.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20160401054420/http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/multide.html</a>#H

MagikGimp

OK, both the Walnut Creek disks (in fact all of theirs I should imagine being free and all) are indeed on archive.org here- <a href="https://archive.org/details/Game_Patches_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_April_1996" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/Game_Patches_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_April_1996</a> and here- <a href="https://archive.org/details/cdrom-toolkit-for-quake2" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/cdrom-toolkit-for-quake2</a> As you might notice, the Quake 2 one is only 100MB so Sonoma did indeed just burn a bunch of extra other stuff on there to fill out the space. As for the 3Dfx Mania disks (there are more than 1), those are still for sale 20 years later and I can't find anywhere else to get them. I might purchase them if I can track them down for cheap. Or I could look up each directory on the video... Might be more fun? Eh, it's the sort of thing I enjoy. ;)

MagikGimp

Well I know what I'll be doing today. I expect the disks are on the Internet Archive or somewhere. Will report back later!

MagikGimp

Good old shovelware patches. I used to remember buying games magazines for their various archives on CD, rather than packs like this. May just be me… but I chucked quite a bit when I saw the author of that guide book though - but maybe that's my mind taking a bit of a wander for its own sake ;)

Rob Caporetto

I have a couple Giant Book + CD-full-of-stuff combos I should look at someday on filler videos or such... Only trouble is that my books are in storage and I haven't the vaguest idea what boxes they'd be in. :|

Kris Asick

and "much much more" Well, more crap is still crap. Reminds me of so many underwhelming CDs back in the 90s.

Gary Leigh

There was one that was basically a Battleship sort of game that involved turn-based tactics with ships on a grid and a fog of war that I've never been able to remember the name of, nor the disc I got it on. Very frustrating.

I miss shareware shovelware packs. I had a couple as a kid that actually had a few gems hidden among them.

Selling shareware and freeware was always a kind of moral grey area in the 90s as far as IP law was concerned, I think.

Man I miss making my own themes in Windows. So much time wasted, so many wavs used. I remember making a theme based on Hackers back in the day. Oh the joys.

Justin Dotson

Yeah, when one of these actually turned out to be good it was quite the event :)

LGR

Interesting! I wonder if it ever became a more complete game or if it remained a demo.

LGR

Glad you enjoyed, sir!

LGR

Not yet, I only just filmed this yesterday and don't have a V1 setup on-hand :)

LGR

Ha! Yeah that was a problem then for sure. I have a few such disks that proudly display "VIRUS FREE" on the front of the package just for that reason.

LGR

Not quite, it's by Sonoma Multimedia which is a US company

LGR

I certainly enjoyed it! 100% totality is just wild.

LGR

Yeah, I just got back home from an eclipse festival. 100% totality is something magical, I've never experienced anything like it. Still kind of in shock.

LGR

Man, that Quake 2 theme for Windows was pretty awesome. I would have loved that in 1998 - loved changing around Windows themes in general around that time anyways, to my family's chagrin, haha. Hope you got an awesome view of the eclipse! I know it was really visible in South Carolina, so you probably saw a more total solar eclipse in North Carolina than we did in Michigan (about 80% coverage or so here). We took a break at work and went outside for the eclipse - we passed around a welder's mask in order to look at it. It made for quite a cool memory :)

Lindsay Michelle

Walnut Creek CDs were awesome for hosting on a BBS. That was the way I was able to download Apogee shareware in 1993 and 1994. That company may be a good topic for a video if you ever run out of ideas.

Matt Standish

So great to watch two awesome things at once. Partial (98%) solar eclipse and LGR intertwined. "When I'm not looking at the sun and moon, I'm watching LGR!" Hope you enjoyed the eclipse Clint! From Atlanta, awesome "eclipse" video lol.

Christopher Bassett

Did you say Sanoma made this? Then it might be from the Netherlands since they're a non-gaming publisher of comics and stuff here.

For me it was always the demo disks on the front of MacFormat magazines etc that always without fail let me down... still they kept me busy for a few hours every month!

Oh goodness, these shovelware packs bring back some memories. I remember getting one as a kid at my local walmart to mod Duke Nukem 3D and getting a virus from it. Good times

avfusion

Did you eventually try those 3dfx demos in a pic with a voodoo 1?

What was the story with selling other peoples works at retail? I'm guessing the games publisher had some sort of disclaimer saying all works created in the engine were owned by the publisher? There was a guy selling a Total Annihilation third party race called Mynn back in the day and I think people used to point out the fact he wasn't allowed to sell it due to the licence agreement.

Shapey Fiend

Walnut Creek! Purveyors of Linux installation CDs in the 90's! (And boatloads of shareware discs, but we had our own sources on the Old Continent)

Bastien Nocera

Yeah! Those packs usually promised way more than they could deliver. I always got disappointed myself, and more so when doing what you did here with newer and beefier hardware... that never works. Hehe, but still - this was a mother great trip back memory lane. Keep 'em coming! :D

Anders Enger Jensen

Woah, what a flashback I got from that weird bug game you tried in the beginning. I remember that I also had that one game on some odd compilation disc way back when.

I remember the days I would get excited about those CD's until I had tried enough of them to be conditioned for disappointment.