Chronologically sorted demos

I'm wanting to build a collection of demos sorted by year however DSDA can't be sorted chronologically. Is there a repository with this functionality? I've seen this thread but it gives no real answers. I'm really interested in seeing many early demos but checking the date modified after downloading an archive is tedious. Any help would be appreciated.

I have previously considered this a long time ago, but it is a herculean task for several reasons.

- There are a LOT of DOOM demos.  Even if you limit yourself to Iwad demos, there are thousands.

- The LMP file timestamp is not 100% reliable.  Many DOS-era demos have incorrect timestamps

- or were archived by themselves(outside of a zipfile) so they have inaccurate dates.

You can use some OS file managers(or a tool like Lookdisk) to list all the files and files in archives into a textfile that can be manipulated and sorted to get the answers  you seek.

It would be interesting to see the surges and lulls in the amount of demos recorded over time.  DOOM recording is busier now than it ever was. (well, possibly a bit higher a few years ago, but in general, it is more prolific now).

Funny that in the 8900 days since DOOM was released, there have been about 12 demos recorded everyday since then(that have been released).  I imagine that some days in 2014 or so, probably several hundred were recorded in the same day.   A lot of DOOMers have been busty.  Oh, I meant to say busy, but perhaps they've been busty too.

dsda3 has this feature. We are actually getting very close to beginning large scale importing of Andy's dsda, starting naturally with the iwads. Extracting the recording date from all the demos is one of the main goals. As opulent mentions, inaccurate dates are unfortunately a potential issue though.

You can see demo count by year here:

https://dsdarchive.com/stats

You can sort by record date here:

https://dsdarchive.com/feed?page=34&sort_by=record_date

It's more or less only heretic and hexen Demos right now though. Like I said, I'm confident we are getting close to importing doom 🙂

@Opulent Using Lookdisk could be pretty viable. I wonder how big the full DSDA archive would be ?

@kraflab Oh dude, yes, that's awesome. Shot to everyone working on dsda3, that's awesome. Do you know if anyone is working on a demo browser client? I've seen the thread talking about how to launch demos from Windows explorer via prboom+ but it'd be nice to have a frontend for it. I might look at whipping one up in python if no one has really done so already.

There are multiple launchers afaik, but I've never used one so not sure if something exactly like that exists.