Post Aut6uLRZYbdoP5rWjI by FeralRobots@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by FeralRobots@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #Aus5hxas6wNnqZmahM by foone@digipres.club
2025-06-07T01:18:19Z
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Those shovelware CDs full of games scraped from BBSes and the early internet are the cave paintings of software archeology.
(DIR) Post #Aus5liZ9vQSQOjm0sS by foone@digipres.club
2025-06-07T01:19:04Z
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Certainly there were many more things not preserved from those ancient times, but this particular niche got preserved, so it's vitally important for understanding a distant time
(DIR) Post #Aus7291HRHrp1uK7iy by castanea_jo@ni.hil.ist
2025-06-07T01:33:10Z
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@foone when I try to explain these things to people that didn't experience it they just kinda stare at me like i'm not right in the head. "no but really you could buy 10 cds full of more software and shitty fonts and music tracker files and clip art than your 486 could ever think of handling. it cost like 8 dollars at babbages, which is not a place I just made up!"
(DIR) Post #Aus7refPXEBzx0el4i by foone@digipres.club
2025-06-07T01:42:03Z
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@c02613 exactly
(DIR) Post #AusA2H3ProRRoK4mCu by phoenixgee@mstdn.social
2025-06-07T02:06:48Z
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@foone It would've cost you nothing to not write "distant time" :DWe're not dinosaurs!
(DIR) Post #AusE2zpnm3RKVlJ9SS by baljemmett@mastodon.online
2025-06-07T02:51:42Z
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@foone I still miss Shovelware Diggers, even if I entirely understand Kris's reasons for moving on from the series!
(DIR) Post #AusGEbB5TMl5QIvMJs by foone@digipres.club
2025-06-07T03:16:15Z
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@baljemmett yeah, it was a fun series
(DIR) Post #AusRX1WBNUbNpAmOEy by Min1123@social.linux.pizza
2025-06-07T05:22:43Z
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@foone I had a demo disk with Kodak Photo CD files on it. That was a weird hybrid Windows/Mac disk. I also remember when they made the Wing Commander 2 disk, there were system specs for what the seek time had to be on your drive, or it was too slow to operate properly.
(DIR) Post #AusSHWOktkgmv0TfQO by otte_homan@theblower.au
2025-06-07T05:31:13Z
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@foone hey this is how Knoppix was distributed for like decades!
(DIR) Post #Ausmt3SIx9wRF2JQ92 by foone@digipres.club
2025-06-07T09:22:05Z
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@Min1123 fun fact! All photo-CDs are also CD-I games. They wanted photocd support on the Philips CD-I but didn't have room in the firmware, so they just put the binary on every photo-cd
(DIR) Post #Aut2C7X7W0gEhd77y4 by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-06-07T12:13:30Z
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@foone I recovered (at least the executables of) some public-domain Atari ST fractal programs I wrote when I was goofing around in college from one of those shovelware CDs archived on cd.textfiles.com. I had some fun running them with Hatari at several times their original speed.
(DIR) Post #Aut6uLRZYbdoP5rWjI by FeralRobots@mastodon.social
2025-06-07T13:06:22Z
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@foone going back even farther, you could order share/freeware on 5.25 inch diskettes for $1 each.
(DIR) Post #AutdKyCDISYGecPyIS by foone@digipres.club
2025-06-07T19:09:49Z
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@FeralRobots oh sure, I bought plenty of them back in the day.but CD-ROMs have more durability so a lot of this shovelware has lasted longer than those disks
(DIR) Post #Aux0E2U3pxAqLUJGjo by FeralRobots@mastodon.social
2025-06-09T10:10:19Z
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@foone For reasons I should probably do some work on I hung onto a lot of those 5.25" diskettes long past the point where I had a drive to read them or a system that would run the software on them.