Intro
Welcome to The DOS Collection! Release 2: 1981-1990, Part 1 of 2. What is this? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Here's a continuation of an archive of DOS games, named in a TOSEC inspired convention, accurately titled with publisher data and year of release, with flags for languages, hacked versions, bad dumps and everything else you'd come to expect in a "full set" of games. We wanted to finally put DOS in the same state of organization as all the console collections and other computers have enjoyed for years. Perhaps DOS was just too chaotic; too much work to organize before, but now that we've started, we hope you'll join in and help too. There's lots to do! Yes, this collection is similar to other DOS torrents out there. In fact, a lot of what you see here was originally sourced from other torrents, and we give full credit and kudos to those who have come before and put in all that work. What we wanted to do was take it to the next level. We wanted a higher standard of naming and accuracy, and to fill in the missing gaps. You'll quickly see that this collection is more than just a re-hash of everything else that's out there. You'll find several titles that have never been released (to our knowledge) to the internet, different versions of games, lots of new non-English games, notes about individual titles, tools to help organize the collection on your hard drive and more. Eventually we wish to publish screenshot packs, box covers, documentation and possibly even a GUI front-end to allow you to browse the games via the web and play them directly on your computer. This is just the beginning. Part 1 of 2? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= We've realized that not everyone is as dedicated to archiving all things DOS as we are. Not everyone wants to have every version of every minor hack or crack that has ever been released. Not everyone wants to clutter up their hard drives with alternate versions of the same game. So, we've taken the opportunity to split up the collection into the main release, and a compendium release, which contains all the alternates, hacks, overdumps and things that won't interest most people. The companion release will not have any duplicate filenames across the collection, so you can safely download both and store them in the same folder if you want the entire (~3600 files) set. Look familiar? =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Yep. We've released a lot of these files before. Why are we torturing you and making you download them all again? Well, this collection is better, bigger, and more accurate. We've cleaned up a lot of titles, removed a couple viruses that popped into view, removed more BBS ads, added some really obscure games that have never before been seen on the net. There were so many changes that we couldn't put out just an update pack, we had to start over again. Sorry, but when you consider there are ~3600 files in this torrent and it's roughly 1Gig in size, it's not really that big of a deal. Oh yeah, we added an entire year's worth of games! 1990. A pivotal year where DOS gaming bloomed into a platform to be respected. 1990 laid the foundation where VGA graphics, respectable speed CPUs, and sound cards were the norm. The hardware was no longer the bottleneck working against the artists' creativity. Shareware steps up and is showing its colors. The gaming scene explodes from here. Some notes. (just stop reading when you get bored-these get more and more technical as we go along) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 1) We want your feedback. The only way to improve the accuracy in this collection is to get more eyes looking for bugs. If you think you've found an error, please send us a note in on the wiki pages and let us know. Even better, if you think you've got a title we're missing in the collection, PLEASE get ahold of us and we'll roll it into the next release. We have a wiki available here:http://www.underground-gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collection Please use it. It will take you to all kinds of information you may be looking for about this project. 2) We need more help. This portion of the collection took about 1.5 years to compile. Certainly things will go faster now that a work flow has been established, but we're an estimated 1/5th of the way through cataloging the 10,000+ files that are out there. We'd like to see the end of this collection before we get too old to enjoy any of it. We need people with DOS knowledge, who love games, and have a critical eye for accuracy. We need people trolling websites and torrents looking for undiscovered games. We need people who know how to crack games and how to work with disk and CD images. We need people using DOSCenter to help find games that we don't already know about. 3) This collection includes shareware titles, commercial release, freeware games, and everything in between. Some may be bothered by including such things, but we felt that we couldn't properly archive all that DOS stands for without including everything made for DOS. There are also some really amazing shareware titles out there which would be a shame to not include. The distinction between freeware and public domain games is often too blurry to decide, especially in the early days when people were programming to show off the capabilities of a new machine, not to commercialize their work. If it's a game or in some ways entertaining, and it works in DOS, it's in here. We did try to tag shareware titles with a [SW] label to help people sort them out if they so choose. 4) There is often a trade-off between playability and accuracy. While we would love to have a perfectly preserved image of a diskette or CD that a game was released on with copy protection and disk labels intact, many games were never distributed on physical media. Diskette and CD images are more klunky to use and emulation of them is not yet perfect, especially when copy protection tricks are emulated. We find it more important, at this stage in the collection, to maximize playability. This means all copy protection must be removed, even if it means sacrificing a portion of the accuracy of the game's release. This also sometimes means releasing an installed version of a game, rather than providing the install utility. Our motto of "unzip and run" supersedes "unzip, mount disk image, start game, look up documentation, type in correct answer, run". 5) We collected up all the different versions of any game we could find. Is there a difference between "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter" version 1.0X and version 1.1a? We don't know, but obviously there is enough of a difference that Sierra had to release another version, so it's enough for us to collect. Likewise, any game that was published in one country as "game xyz" and in another country as "game abc" we collected too. Any time a game is different in any way, we put it in the collection. You may also see games tagged with [a1], [a2], etc. That means these are alternate versions of the same game. Typically this comes from different ways of taking care of copy protection, not necessarily different releases (by the publisher) of the same game. Most of these alternate versions are placeholders until they can be analysed closely to determine exactly what the differences are. Likely some of these will disappear from later releases. Any time no version number was available in the program, we assume it's version 1.0. Therefore, whenever a game says version 1.0, we don't add the version number to its title, otherwise it would be quite cluttered looking. Likewise with games in languages other than English. The default is English for all games, so only when a game is not in English, do we tag the game with whatever language or country code the game is from. Our main wiki page has the breakdown of all the tags and flags. Please also check the DOS Collection Notes wiki page to see if there are any details as to why a game is tagged as an alternate version: http://www.underground-gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collection_1979-1995/notes http://www.underground-gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collection_1979-1995/notes1990 6) There are some bad games in the collection. Often these are "bad, but best dump known" at this time. Some games are missing some key files, others are not (yet) cracked. Each game in this condition is tagged as [b1] or [b2], and noted in the notes wiki. This does not mean that all games not marked as [b1] will be perfectly playable under DOSBox or on a DOS machine. What doesn't work in DOSBox often works on a true DOS machine and vice versa. Since no system is perfect, your results may vary. If you think you've stumbled across something that should be fixed (late in game copy protection perhaps) then please get ahold of us to take a look. 7) Files included/deleted from the archive. Whenever possible, a cracked version and an uncracked version of the changed files are provided to help offset the historical inaccuracies introduced with a cracked game. Look for game.exe and game.ex_ inside the archive, where the .ex_ version is the untouched copy. Each file has a file_id.diz inside the archive. This file_id.diz simply re-hashes the filename, but also explains any tag or flag used in the naming, so that there is no confusion as to what a (tr en) means or a [h1]. Any time an original file_id.diz was included in the archive (such as titles released by Apogee) it is renamed to file_id.di_ Non-original file_id.diz's, such as those created by individuals, or pirate groups, are overwritten. Whenever possible, we try and clean up a title as much as possible. This means no BBS ads, courier group .nfo's, savegames, config files or anything else. Nothing that was there at the time the publisher published the game should be there now. Please note that the main focus at this time is the collection itself, additional/unwanted files will slowly be weeded out as additional dumps of games are made available and comparisons made to generate more known good dumps of games. Titles currently tagged as [a1] and [a2] due to differences in copy protection can eventually be merged together to create an untouched copy of the .exe. These are tasks for later generations. 8) There are some disk images. There are a couple dozen .IMG or .TD0 files included in the collection. These are mostly placeholders for whenever some talented individual can make a boot-loader for them and make them run entirely in DOS. These files are not zipped up, to help them stick out as placeholders, and to make sure someone doesn't try to unzip-n-run them. A majority of the disks that have been converted are all tagged as [DC], meaning DOS Conversion, meaning this game was a PC-Booter and did not use an operating system to be playable, but has been converted over to work in DOS. It is often time consuming work to convert them, but there are emulators out there which can also handle booting from them. Technically since these are not DOS games, they shouldn't even be in the list, but hey, when you've got 2000 DOS games, what's another 50? There are also some PCjr specific cartridge dumps in the mix too (.jrc files). These also need to be converted to run in DOS someday, although likely to only ever work on a PCjr in DOS. 9) A few games have tags like this: [!] That means "known good dump" which means that 2 individual copies of the same game were dumped independently and then verified against each other. These are nice to have, and eventually we'll get more of them, but the focus is currently on getting a first copy of each game. There will be more [!]'s as the project progresses. 10) We like mobygames.com. Whenever possible, we've been sticking with the main title of a game to match the title on mobygames. There are many reasons for this, the first of which is we believe it is an accurate source of information; all submissions have to be verified by an approver, so things like subtitles and spelling errors are typically weeded out by the time the game appears in the database. The second and most important reason for matching our titles with moby is that we can then utilize the other data on the site, without having to do any additional matching title work. Any web-friendly application could theoretically take a filename from this collection, drop it into the search engine at mobygames, and be put directly into the game's summary, with access to screenshots and box cover scans just a click away. We will be exploring this type of interface in the upcoming days. Please note that this project is not in any way affiliated with mobygames or its owners. 11) Viruses. We hate 'em, and whenever something pops up in a scan, we want to verify it and fix it. We do have to be careful though; some modern scanners will wrongly accuse a DOS game as some kind of windows trojan due to false alarms. (it would be very, very difficult to inject a windows based trojan dropper into a DOS game without completely breaking it) To the best of our knowledge, the collection is clean. If your scanner goes off on something, please check the release notes wiki page(s) to check to see if it has already been investigated and found to be ok. If not, let us know! 12) We have tools now! We've developed a scanning tool similar to ROMCenter or CMPro which can help organize your collection of games and compare what you have against ours. It's called DOSCenter, and there is a DOSCenter friendly .dat file included with this torrent. It has all the knowledge of all the games that we have gone through so far. (even some yet to be released) Greets and shouts: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Underground Gamer, Mobygames, the abandonware sites around the world, the people who have put hours into their own DOS torrents, the slaves who helped work on this project, the TOSEC folks for the naming convention, the DOSBox crew, the people who write programs like ROMCenter, CLRMAMEPro and GoodTools. Thanks especially to the people who write and distribute these games. If you're a publisher or an author, we hope that you'll look at this collection as more of an archive of history and that it supersedes common piracy. This is an attempt to document the evolution of PC based gaming, not a way to get free games. In other words, please don't sue us for doing this.