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killbotvii

Sharing my collection of doom shovelware from the mid 90s

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Over the past few years, I've found various old CDs containing hundreds of doom wads all basically from 1994 to 1996. After sifting through them and deleting the many MANY duplicates, I've ended up with exactly 4,438 unique wads. It's possible that you, the reader, may have even made one or two of them! Without further ado, here they are.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/wiv432ik1a0t8ft/shovelware_galore.zip

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Pretty good for bookkeeping.

Which shovelware CDs do you have that you got these from?

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Good. If you had played and remembered some of them, are there any outstandingly non-crappy ones you can point out?

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@buttspit, Off the top of my head, I know I got a bunch from the D!ZONE CDs and Doom Heaven 2. Oh, and I distinctly remember "Maximum Death for Doom 2" as well. There were probably around 20-30 CDs that I collected. I wish I still had them all, but last year there was a flood in the basement and many of the ruined boxes were thrown out. Unfortunately, that mistakenly included every last one of the CDs as well. I'm glad I back them all up when I did.

@scifista42, I've played a few hundred of them at this point, only a handful of them stood out. I actually remember playing one or two that I swear were already on the archive!

@Angry Saint, It'll probably take multiple people to figure that out in any reasonable amount of time!

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Nice collection. Should only take a couple of days to filter out what's already in the archive.

Angry Saint said:

The point is: are there any wads not present in the archives? If yes, it is your duty to upload them!

Would help if there were text files to accompany them, I don't like uploading without at least knowing who to attribute the wad to.

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You gotta remember though, back then, especially D!ZONE, didn't care about crediting the author. If my memory serves me correctly, some CDs just contained direct rips from the archive itself.

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The D!Zone disks don't fare badly text file-wise, what mainly bugs me is that nearly every wad's datestamp has been altered. As for direct rips from the archive, that sounds like Walnut Creek's "Toolkit for Doom" series. They also happened to own cdrom.com and probably didn't think twice about using it as a source of shovelware for CDs - until id Software started dragging publishers into court for breach of copyright or non-payment of royalties, not sure which.

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Somebody would ask Matt Tropiano, or another programmer with knowledge of wad structure, to write a simple program that would check lump names inside every wad and put the wad to D1 folder if it finds ExMx, or to D2 folder if it finds MAPxx. Of course, the program would do this with all wads in the directory at once.

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The completist in me hollers Thank You!! I'm sure you must have some I've missed, and it's nice to have all of 'em consolidated. Did you check the dumpware archive (someone must have the link handy) to see if they're missing any of what you have?

Not sorted? Good ol' Movelev to the rescue, heh. :)

BTW back in that era files on CD would often have the date the CD was made, not the original datestamp, probably a limitation in the software of the era.

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Thank you for sharing, killbotvii.

Just finished sorting through this file dump. What we got here is this:

\d1	DOOM1 WADs	1,553
\d2	DOOM2 WADs	2,762 
\gfx	graphics WADs	   22
\mus	music WADs	   22
\sfx	sound WADs	   56
\other	misc WADs	    6
\broken corrupted WADs	    7
The complete file list: list (Pastebin)

Sorted ZIP organized into subdirectories/folders as above plus the list, 330 MB:

download link #1 (4shared)
download link #2 (Mediafire)

Some observations:
  • Some WAD files come in groups (like Star Wars levels + graphics + sounds). I put the few that caught my eye in subdirs of their own, below \d1 and \d2, the numbers of D1 and D2 WADs count each of these groups as one WAD
  • Care has been taken to identify music-only WADs that initially wound up in \d1
  • Some music WADs have sound effects and vice versa; any WADs with more than a couple of sounds went into \sfx
  • Broken WADs would not open in XWE or SLADE3. All of these have "PWAD" in the file headers, so they might be salvageable.
  • \other\DM1LABEL.WAD appears to be just TEXTURE1 and PNAMES from DOOM2.WAD
  • \other\DMLITE.WAD is this early fullbright COLORMAP cheat by Bill Neisius
  • The three gus* WADs in \other are custom instrument mappings for GUS
  • \other\OK.WAD has six WAD files (OK1-OK6) and README.TXT as directory entries!
  • \d2\K12.WAD has its map marker named as "MAP01 L" but seems OK otherwise.
  • \gfx\D2PTEX.WAD is a "D1 textures for D2" pack by the same guy who did the D2 conversion of Aliens-TC.
  • The total number of WADs is 4437.

killbotvii said:

@SavageCorona, That would take a fairly long amount of time.

Half an hour work, not counting uploading.

edit: half an hour was not enough ;)
edit2: pwned by GreyGhost!

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I see a lot of familiar filenames I've seen on the D!Zone and other shovelware discs.

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Nice! Thanks!! I recognise an amazing lot of the WAD names, which I suppose says something about how I waste my time. :)

I vaguely recall that a few files on one or another of the old CDs were truncated, which might explain the broken WADs.

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Correction
- about two hundred WADs that were detected as D1 turned out to be D1->D2 conversions with leftover D_ExMy entries
- two more WADs with bad dirs found

I'll update my previous post accordingly with a new list and new links in a few.

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Never_Again said:

The total number of WADs is 44,387, the OP's count was off by 39,949.

FTFY ;)

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GreyGhost said:

The D!Zone disks don't fare badly text file-wise, what mainly bugs me is that nearly every wad's datestamp has been altered. As for direct rips from the archive, that sounds like Walnut Creek's "Toolkit for Doom" series. They also happened to own cdrom.com and probably didn't think twice about using it as a source of shovelware for CDs - until id Software started dragging publishers into court for breach of copyright or non-payment of royalties, not sure which.

Are you able to cite any actual evidence of this? I ask because I have no knowledge of it ever happening.

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If you mean the court proceedings, I'm sure they've been discussed in these forums but will have to go in search of the thread. Closest I have to a citable reference right now is in Part 1 of the Doom Conference where they're discussing the "selling of levels".

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Point of confusion:

id was annoyed at this Laura Beyer selling levels. The illegality they refer to is that *any* PWAD is a derivative work and therefore id technically owns copyright on what she was selling. (And all PWADs, for that matter. Established in a lawsuit, Paramount vs some Star Trek fanfic pub ca.1980. Even using only the setting is "derivative".) The fact that WAD (and fanfic) authors occasionally put a copyright notice in the textfile notwithstanding.

However it's always been acceptable to charge for the *medium* on which freeware is delivered. You can charge for the physical CD (or floppy, or access to a server); you can't charge for its freeware contents. (Admittedly sometimes a fuzzy point, but not argued so long as that price is reasonable for the medium.) In fact this was a common point in shareware/freeware licenses.

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Never_Again said:

Just finished sorting through this file dump.

What exact method(s) did you use?

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Super Text Search and Effective File Search with RegEx e.g.

\WE[1-4]M[1-9]
\WMAP[0-3][0-9]
A lot of D2 WADs in this collection are halfassed auto-conversions from D1 (like in Maximum Doom) done with buggy tools that left old WAD directories in the files, thus a lot of false positives for D1 WADs. Leftover D_ExMy entries in many such WADs add to the confusion. The final cleanup had to be done by scanning \d1 and \d2 with MoveLev, redirecting the output to TXT files and RegEx-searching these latter for stray ExMy/MAPxx entries, as well as any error messages with EditPadPro.

WADs that didn't pass the checks of the first stage were examined manually with XWE (SLADE's loading times would have made it a bit too painful). Fortunately there were only a few dozens of these. Sorting to \gfx, \sfx, \mus and \other was done at this stage manually.

The rest went into \broken.

To killbotvii's credit, LookDisk found no duplicates. There are obvious multiple versions of the same WADs but no real dupes (i.e. with identical content).


@killbotvii: you're welcome. ;)


edit: heh, check out \gfx\IMP2NYMF.WAD, it replaces the Imp with a nekkid Pamela Anderson blondie! (which doesn't look nearly as bad as it sounds :)

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On 6/10/2015 at 7:25 AM, killbotvii said:

Over the past few years, I've found various old CDs containing hundreds of doom wads all basically from 1994 to 1996. After sifting through them and deleting the many MANY duplicates, I've ended up with exactly 4,438 unique wads. It's possible that you, the reader, may have even made one or two of them! Without further ado, here they are.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/wiv432ik1a0t8ft/shovelware_galore.zip

NO IT'S MISSING!!!!!!!

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I think this post have some kind of reorganized folders from the original file, but if you're looking for the original pristine shovelware_galore.zip maybe our master back-up friends  @VVL // @Mad Butcher can help you

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killbotvii last visited was on february 2020, more than 3 years ago, i don't think he will reply

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