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Comment by arduinomancer | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else remember in this era it was common to get a disc with a ton of games on it?

I remember having one as a kid with like 25 games on it and just flipping through playing each for like 10 minutes

Recall playing a lot of Ant Attack from one of those discs for some reason

Tokened shovelware, as in they shoveled as much onto a CDROM as they could. Sometimes, they'd accidentally include not just shareware but licensed software... oops.

The "Shovelware Diggers" YouTube series does a great job documenting these: https://www.youtube.com/user/Pixelmusement

Oh neat thanks for sharing that channel

I one time bought some 4 in 1 box set with Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, The Hunt for Red October, and two other games, I forget. For some reason, the games were stripped of all display drivers except glorious 4-color CGA graphics.

One game had a teal sky, and a hot pink ground, and there other had a pink sky, and teal ocean.

https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive

Thanks to that I was able to locate a game[0] I had been searching for for years by investigating likely candidates on a "1000+ Games!"[1] or somesuch CD.

[0] It was Space Exploration Mission Alpha[2]. A lunar lander clone where you play as aliens visiting all of the Sol system planets. I never did find the non-shareware Space Exploration Mission Bravo, so if anyone knows Jeffrey R. Marken please drop me a line, I'll gladly pay the $16.75.

[1] A bald-faced lie

[2] https://archive.org/details/SpaceExplorationMissionAlpha_102...

You want to check out this archive: https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive

Oof looking through that takes me back to the era of big CD binders

And scratched disks was such a problem, I remember trying weird toothpaste lifehacks to fix them

Ended up buying some games twice due to that

Yet somehow the thrill is gone these days even through we have unlimited games on the mobile app store.

By "disc", you mean CD? I remember this a lot once CD-ROM became huge in the mid 90s, but most of my DOS shareware came on 3.5 inch floppies.

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