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Zed

Look what I've found (Shovelware)

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18 years ago I picked up Doom Fever for $5. Was disappointed by the wads but it introduced me to map making which was a watershed moment super fun at the time.

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The way they've implemented Captcha is a PITA and one of the few things I dislike about MediaFire.

SavageCorona said:

Is shovelware like physical abandonware?

Shovelware is the shameless repackaging and marketing of stuff that's (for the most part) freely distributable. The compilations are often poorly organised, almost as if the files had been dumped on the disk with a shovel. Probably the worst I've seen was a double-sided DVD with over 8000 files on it, only a handful of which were documented, the rest were mostly unidentifiable zips and executables that you opened at your peril.

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Hey that reminds me... Some of the disc images I downloaded from that archive.org site have strange file formats. Instead of good old TXT and ZIP files, they have some weird file extensions. For example, D!Zone Gold has a whole bunch of stuff with DZG file extensions. Okay, so those appear to actually be plain old LHA-compressed files, and at least the wads are uncompressed and playable directly from doom.exe or some port. But D!MATCH has all the non-level files in some kind of weird format with a 12-byte PWAD header. For example, /D!MATCH/DOCS/DESIGN12.D!Z has that header, the original text body, and some kind of binary trailer junk at the end. I guess they expected you to only use their bundled "CD Helper" software to browse the disc? Anyway, it seems weird to alter the original files, instead of keeping a separate DB of file metadata.

The other thing is I found two disc images that seem broken. I had to use bchunk to convert the various bin/cue stuff into ISO format, and most turned out okay but DemonGate666 ended up with quite a few 0-byte files, and D!Zone 3 Collectors Edition was all messed up. The cue file lists 5 tracks, so bchunk created 5 ISO's, and of course those filesystems are hopelessly fubar... I wonder why they didn't just upload ISO files instead. Those other formats aren't well-supported amongst all platforms. In fact, one of the discs (can't remember which) was some oddball format I never encountered before.

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hex11 said:

D!MATCH has all the non-level files in some kind of weird format with a 12-byte PWAD header. For example, /D!MATCH/DOCS/DESIGN12.D!Z has that header, the original text body, and some kind of binary trailer junk at the end. I guess they expected you to only use their bundled "CD Helper" software to browse the disc?

Joe Wilcox at Simply Silly Software probably had an ironclad contract to supply frontends for WizardWorks' disks.

UNDZ - D!ZONE 2 file extractor version 1.00 - (c) 1995, Simply Silly Software

The other thing is I found two disc images that seem broken. I had to use bchunk to convert the various bin/cue stuff into ISO format, and most turned out okay but DemonGate666 ended up with quite a few 0-byte files, and D!Zone 3 Collectors Edition was all messed up. The cue file lists 5 tracks, so bchunk created 5 ISO's, and of course those filesystems are hopelessly fubar... I wonder why they didn't just upload ISO files instead. Those other formats aren't well-supported amongst all platforms. In fact, one of the discs (can't remember which) was some oddball format I never encountered before.

The 0-byte files on Demon Gate is a disk error of some sort. Whoever compiled the CD first used a D1-to-D2 converter to create the WADS2 directory's content and mustn't have noticed they had some failed downloads in WADS1. I've also encountered the occasional incomplete zip or wad in shovelware collections. Not sure what's wrong with D!Zone 3 apart from Dzone.cue indicating that the tracks are in Mode 2 Video CD or Playstation format.

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Hellbent said:

18 years ago I picked up Doom Fever for $5. Was disappointed by the wads but it introduced me to map making which was super fun at the time.



I can't find that one on the archive site. Think you could upload it somewhere to download, or is it already up somewhere?

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Rampage470 said:

I can't find that one on the archive site. Think you could upload it somewhere to download, or is it already up somewhere?


I really don't think it's available online (from experience); maybe that changed. Actually, the physical media itself is notoriously rare.

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Rampage470 said:

I can't find that one on the archive site. Think you could upload it somewhere to download, or is it already up somewhere?

I don't have the CD anymore. I found the image online.

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Rampage470 said:

Hellbent said:

18 years ago I picked up Doom Fever for $5. Was disappointed by the wads but it introduced me to map making which was super fun at the time.

I can't find that one on the archive site. Think you could upload it somewhere to download, or is it already up somewhere?

Here you go - I've also included a directory listing in .csv format.

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buttspit said:

Actually, the physical media itself is notoriously rare.



There's at least one Doom Fever disk still around.


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Yup. And I don't know if I succeeded, but I pointed someone to a copy last year on amazon, I think they bought that copy ;)

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That Doom Fever ISO doesn't work for me. I'm getting this:

$ md5 *.iso
MD5 (Doom_Fever-1995_Maple_Media.iso) = 96405dd5d2c32c968df6d24284891372
$ file Doom_Fever-1995_Maple_Media.iso
Doom_Fever-1995_Maple_Media.iso: data
^ instead of generic/unrecognized "data" should be "ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data"
$ vnconfig -v -c vnd0c Doom_Fever\-1995_Maple_Media\.iso
vnd0c: 144036352 bytes on Doom_Fever-1995_Maple_Media.iso
$ mount -v -r -t cd9660 /dev/vnd0c /mnt/iso
mount_cd9660: /dev/vnd0c on /mnt/iso: Invalid argument
^ works fine for other ISO's

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hex11 said:

vnd0c: 144036352 bytes on Doom_Fever-1995_Maple_Media.iso

If I'm interpreting that correctly, it looks like your download's 128 bytes short.

EDIT - The MD5 checksum matches, so I'll use something different to generate another .iso for you to test.

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GreyGhost said:

I can't find that one on the archive site. Think you could upload it somewhere to download, or is it already up somewhere?

<image> - I've also included a directory listing in .csv format. [/quote]Ah, thank you. Should be interesting.

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GreyGhost said:

If I'm interpreting that correctly, it looks like your download's 128 bytes short.

EDIT - The MD5 checksum matches, so I'll use something different to generate another .iso for you to test.


Yeah, the file on disk is actually the right size, but vnconfig reports something else... I don't know why.

Anyway, I noticed the ISO has a CD001 magic header string 16 bytes later than where the "file" program looks for it. Actually it will recognized several different formats (all listed in /etc/magic) but the nearest one was exactly 16 bytes off. So I tried to adjust it, by discarding the first 16 bytes of the file (with "dd bs=16 skip=1 if=*.iso of=/tmp/foo.iso") and that was enough to make the "file" program happy, but it must have also corrupted the ISO because the mount program didn't like it...

BTW if you have Cygwin, you can also try the "file" program. If that actually reports something resembling an ISO image, then chances are it'll work on any other machine too.

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Try this one - I switched from IsoBuster to ImgBurn, which has produced a significantly smaller .iso image. If it works for you I'll see what's required to replace the .iso currently in the archive.

Haven't tried Cygwin, be interesting to see what it makes of the other .iso images I've created using IsoBuster.


EDIT - Damn! Damn! Damn! Looks like I have half a terabyte of .iso images to re-create.

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The Doom_Fever_Test.iso works perfectly! I guess isobuster is using some extension that's not supported on all platforms.

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GreyGhost said:

EDIT - Damn! Damn! Damn! Looks like I have half a terabyte of .iso images to re-create.

I assume then that most if not all of the ISOs in the Internet Archive collection are invalid?

Having just spent an entire day last week downloading all of those files, I would like very much a complete list of which ones are invalid and notification of when valid ones are uploaded.

It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and bandwidth to test mount the images before uploading and widely disseminating them. I hate to complain about something being done voluntarily in good will but, it was a real effort to get all of that stuff pulled down in the first place.

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Quasar said:

I assume then that most if not all of the ISOs in the Internet Archive collection are invalid?

Nope - only my personal backups, which is mostly Amiga CDs. Doom Fever's currently my sole contribution to the archive and it's probably fine until you try using it on a non-Windows platform.

@hex11 - I've re-done a few more .iso images and they're consistently nearly 15% smaller, so I suspect that by default IsoBuster produces Mode1/2352 image files.

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GreyGhost said:

Nope - only my personal backups, which is mostly Amiga CDs. Doom Fever's currently my sole contribution to the archive and it's probably fine until you try using it on a non-Windows platform.

@hex11 - I've re-done a few more .iso images and they're consistently nearly 15% smaller, so I suspect that by default IsoBuster produces Mode1/2352 image files.

Ahh OK thanks for the clarification. I was dreading pulling all that down again 6_9

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No problem. I expect the penalty for filling the archive with useless junk is death by stoning or something similarly unpleasant, which is a fate I'd prefer to avoid.

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GreyGhost said:

I expect the penalty for filling the archive with useless junk is death by stoning or something similarly unpleasant, which is a fate I'd prefer to avoid.

For a second there I misread stoning as storing which then made me think of people being stored in UAC crates. :P

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For those of you having problems with the images, I just wanted to say that I'm using IZArc to extract them and I've found no problems at all. I hope this will be helpful.

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Even if a lot of the wads aren't great, I'll still try these out once my Internet connection recovers from "excess bandwidth usage".

The only DOOM shovelware CD I have (besides Master Levels) is PC Super Games volume 1 - "over 70Mb of add-ons for the full registered version of DOOM" plus SW versions of Hocus Pocus, Raptor, Blake Stone, and DOOM v1.5.

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I just have the D!Zones (Gold and 2 physically), Demongate and Maximum DooM to sift through. There is so much redundant crap among several others I obtained so I just deleted them as well.

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