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General Rainbow Bacon

Very old Doom shovelware cd?

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So i was just recalling some memories of going into videogame stores when i was younger and looking at the backs of Doom shovelware cds, and remembering some of the screenshots. There was one particular box that I remember had strange looking textures and weapons in it, kinda like Doom 64 but not quite. I remember the lava had yellow and orange in it, and there was a chaingun looking weapon, and no monsters were in the screenshots. Since then, i have never seen a dl of the weapons/textures/maps in this pack, anyone remember this pack? Probably came out in '95 '96, it wasn't D!Zone and it wasn't Maximum Doom, I know that.

E: One last think: I remember the box art had a lot of Yellow and it the font was a red color and looked vaguely gothic.

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I seem to recall one of these shovelware CDs having mock-up screenshots on it, but the contents were just normal doom levels. Probably what you're thinking about. It was discussed here at one point...

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This rings a bell, I bought a doom level cd based on the cover art which was just some pre-rendered picture (having NOTHING to do with the content of the cd which was just 1000s of trash wads). Can't find the CD now though, probably junked it.

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DoomHero85 said:

There was one particular box that I remember had strange looking textures and weapons in it, kinda like Doom 64 but not quite. I remember the lava had yellow and orange in it, and there was a chaingun looking weapon, and no monsters were in the screenshots. Since then, i have never seen a dl of the weapons/textures/maps in this pack, anyone remember this pack? Probably came out in '95 '96, it wasn't D!Zone and it wasn't Maximum Doom, I know that.

The nearest I've found so far is D!Zone Gold which has six "Simulated D!ZONE screens" on the back. The front has a lot of yellow/gold in the text, which is set against a grey stone wall backdrop. Is this even remotely close to what you remember?


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I've recently been getting keen interest in creating, or getting records of file lists for as many Doom shovelware compilations as I could.

Judging by your description, Doomhero85, I'd also have to go with one of the D!Zone series.

But perhaps it's one of these:

Deathday
D-1000
Demon Gate

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buttspit said:

But perhaps it's one of these:

Deathday
D-1000
Demon Gate

I've got Deathday and Demon Gate, and neither of them really match DoomHero85's description. Demon Gate has no screenshots on the jewel case at all, and Deathday has pretty normal looking shots, barring what appears to be an image of the beta chaingun.

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The D-1000 box has a gothic looking illustration on the front and no screenshots, so I think we can rule it out.

@buttspit - Here's a bunch of CD listings I did a while back as comma-delimited text files, here's some more for good measure. I've acquired some more disks since then so another batch of listings is probably in order.

Marnetmar said:

The fuck? It doesn't even look like Doom. What was the point of those screenshots?

It gives potential purchasers something to drool over - preferably while the box is still shrinkwrapped and easy to wipe dry.

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Couldn't the sellers be sued for advertising that's so drastically different though? And are those screens even from an actual game? Whetever it is, it looks like a cross between Quake 1 and Doom 64.

EDIT: Small chance, but maybe these guys had access to a beta version of Doom 64?

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Probably get away with it so long as they don't claim they're actual screenshots, if nothing else they'd set aspiring mappers a goal to achieve.

My guess would be a purpose built Doom/Quake map with some custom textures, a bit of PhotoShopping and some suitable looking sprites pasted on.

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Marnetmar said:

The fuck? It doesn't even look like Doom. What was the point of those screenshots?


Shaky legal ground.

Doom's license essentially forbids the sale of pwads; many of these shovel ware discs got around this by claiming the money people paid for them was for the time spent looking for wads and putting them on the disk/CD.

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Marnetmar said:

The fuck? It doesn't even look like Doom. What was the point of those screenshots?


Probably the same reason why 8-bit Famiclones show screenshots from Mega Drive, SNES, and even Playstation 2 games ;-)

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Issues that are cropping up in this thread have also been touched upon in the Wiki.

Vermil said:

Shaky legal ground.

Doom's license essentially forbids the sale of pwads; many of these shovel ware discs got around this by claiming the money people paid for them was for the time spent looking for wads and putting them on the disk/CD.

Very shaky ground. Those publishers couldn't use the shareware distribution model as a defense and even if the wad authors released their work into the public domain, the Doom license would still dictate the permissible methods of distribution. While I can't find a reference at the moment, I recall having read that id Software took legal action against several shovelware CD publishers for unpaid royalties, with the case being settled out of court for a six digit sum.

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Greyghost wins: D!Zone Gold was it. I could have sworn it wasn't D!zone but i guess I was wrong. Anyway, here's a fun project we could work on. Those weapons and textures look pretty fucking good don't they? Let's make 'em, I've wanted to use them ever since I saw that boxart.

@Marnetmar: No It doesn't look like Doom, but it does look fucking cool.

@buttspit: I never saw any of those, you got shots of those too?

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NoneeLlama said:

Yesterday I found a site that has covers of a lot of these shovelware cd's. Most of them got actual screenshots/sprites from the game on their covers, but there are also some really crazy ones.
http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/doomde.html
http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/multide.html


Ugh......skimming throughout that list was depressing.

A lot of the screenshots shown did not even look like they were taken from the game. Some of the box arts were cool though.

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I don't know, a lot of the screenshots looked legit do me. Mostly it's the D!Zone discs that had those weird "simulated" screenshots.

Btw, I don't know how you would manage to recreate those in a mod, since there is so much lighting effects in there. If you want to get anywhere close you might have to use an advanced port like Doomsday or something.

Speaking of ports, it looks like there was even some Boom shovelware. :D

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I remember that D!Zone 2 cover as I still have the original CD, albeit heavily used. The screenshots on the front are from DOOM2.WAD, the first is MAP18 with a horizontally inverted pistol sprite and the other two are MAP13 inside the red brick building.

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Something interesting to note was the D!Zone had its own sub-series, called 150.

There was like D!Zone 150 and D!Zone 2 150, both with 150 levels of course. Besides the regular D!Zone 2, which I think had 1000 levels. You know, I've never ever seen the actual, original D!Zone or how much levels it has. I've seen D!Zone Collector's Edition (900 maps), D!Zone 150 and a D!Zone Mac which had like 3000 or 7000 levels.

Then the Mac Demon Gate had somewhere in the similar 3000-7000.

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D!Zone Mac claims to have "2000 best-ever levels!"

NoneeLlama said:

Yesterday I found a site that has covers of a lot of these shovelware cd's. Most of them got actual screenshots/sprites from the game on their covers, but there are also some really crazy ones.
http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/doomde.html
http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/multide.html

Includes a bunch of disks I haven't encountered - bookmarked for future reference. Thanks.

hex11 said:

Speaking of ports, it looks like there was even some Boom shovelware. :D

Heh - I think they were hoping to stay under the radar. The Boom 2 disk describes itself (on the back inlay) as "The supplement CD for the award winning action game by ID software!". Level-ROM - a multi-game CD from Germany - took a different tack and censored the names of some games it contained content for. :D


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NoneeLlama said:

Yesterday I found a site that has covers of a lot of these shovelware cd's. Most of them got actual screenshots/sprites from the game on their covers, but there are also some really crazy ones.


I helped the guy who made this website a little bit, he is searching for this stuff since a long time, and still do.

GreyGhost said:

Heh - I think they were hoping to stay under the radar. The Boom 2 disk describes itself (on the back inlay) as "The supplement CD for the award winning action game by ID software!". Level-ROM - a multi-game CD from Germany - took a different tack and censored the names of some games it contained content for. :D


This was very common in germany in the nineties, game mags started with this kind of censoring gametitles, when they are banned. Back then, they feared legal consequences.

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Well the CD is from 1994 but still that is very cheap to make a cover like that (the CD also was cheap, probably because the contents are also cheap, if not free). At the time I was happy with it though, especially the editors on it made me happy (but I didn't know any better back then).

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Hehe, someone should start a project to make neo-shovelware ISO's, and matching cover artwork. Except instead of crappy maps, bundle only the best stuff from 1994-97. Then anyone can download ISO, print cover art, and have nice CDs. :)

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NoneeLlama said:

Yesterday I found a site that has covers of a lot of these shovelware cd's. Most of them got actual screenshots/sprites from the game on their covers, but there are also some really crazy ones.
http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/doomde.html
http://www.addoncollector.spielepedia.de/multide.html


I like how some of these list themselves having over 6000 levels. Maybe if they did get that many maybe they should get some cash for their efforts in finding all those. :P A real good look back. SOme of those boxarts though look pretty neat.

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CodeImp said:

Well the CD is from 1994 but still that is very cheap to make a cover like that (the CD also was cheap, probably because the contents are also cheap, if not free). At the time I was happy with it though, especially the editors on it made me happy (but I didn't know any better back then).

I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with my comment of the screens on the cover being the shots of the prb? My question is, how did some crappy shovelware company get the prb to get those screenshots out of it in 1994? I thought that it wasn't released to the general public until years later. Was the cd made by a magazine publisher?

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