Hunting down old game addons and desktop themes

[leilei]

One of the many quests I take on the internet is thorough hunting of old addons for id software games and Plus! desktop themes (from 95-97 era) that no longer settle stabilly on the internet and that Google can't match. Sometimes i'm trying to find tracker modules too that don't exist online anymore.
Any suggestions?
Desktop themes are the hardest since most are just y2k trash with suspect spyware and malware.

[DOSGuy]

Google fails me more often than their reputation would lead me to expect. When a Google search returns no results, I sometimes try Vivisimo. It's a meta search engine that searches dozens of search engines. Sure enough, it almost always finds what I was looking for.

Just the other day, I decided to do a search for a song I learned as a child, and Google returned only one result, which wasn't useful. I searched with Vivisimo and it returned a second result from someone's MySpace page, and it was exactly the poem I was looking for. This sort of thing has happened to me at least half a dozen times. Google either fails to index pages like this, or is banned from doing so by the robots.txt file. If you're looking for something so obscure that Google can't find it, try Vivisimo. When Google fails, Vivisimo succeeds.

The other nice thing about Vivisimo is that it organizes results into "clusters", so that you can easily search the results by category.

At this point I would like to state for the record that that I am not an employee of Vivisimo, nor is this a paid endorsement. Any meta search engine would probably do, but Vivisimo happens to be the meta search engine that I use.

[leilei]

coincidentally i also did use clusty

so far i have to stalk veterans on irc (that have hoarded rare things in the 90s) and get them to DCC to me. So far it's working good for the quake stuff.

i'm running a site for lost stuff like that but I feel linking to it here would constitute as advertising. There's nothing illegal and 'LOL ABANDONWARE' on it though.

[DOSGuy]

I applaud your efforts to preserve anything rare and forgotten from oblivion. I'm very interested to see what you've compiled. Feel free to post a link.

[leilei]

Ok

the site's not openopen or known about yet, there's loads of funny sarcastic hostility in early news items. Before I knew about ClassicDOSgames I also was going to do the idea of archiving as many depreciated historic versions as possible of popular games for DOS. It's focused on lost stuff and very very obscure 80s public domain freeware games no 'big' "dos games!!! yea we got keen!!! register on our forums we have 1000 memmers!!! vdm sound rules!!!" site cares about

[DOSGuy]

That is some seriously nerdy stuff! I'm impressed by people who know so much about such obscure stuff. It takes a real passion for software.

Good old Klik & Play. I was pretty young when I got that program. The built-in games were pretty good, and I made a few games of my own. The problem was that I couldn't have too many objects on the screen at once because I only had a 486 DX 33. The game got seriously slow when there were more than a few enemies in a level. Obviously I started this site as a DOS site, so I received some joke comments about Windows games being lousy when I decided to add Win16, but Klik & Play is a seriously nostalgic bit of Windows 3.x history for me.

[leilei]

Klik & Play gets slow even on a 2ghz, it's just not cut for loads of active objects

let me know if you come across any 3dgcs games (i.e. contains pnocomp, go.bat, starts with pie 3d or WELCOME TO PYGMY) because i like to collect those. Chub Gam 3d is an infamous example of one, it's raelly hard to believe it won so many 'freeware' awards. Man the bar for freeware FPS games was really really low back in 97/98 3dgcs games aren't really quality enough to be included on classicdosgames.com imo

[Heisanevilgenius]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I found this from a google search.

Leilei, I have come across a number of the games using the engine you mentioned. I was wondering if you could explain to me what 3dgcs is, and where it comes from and so on. I'm very curious about it.

I have three 3dgcs games:

Avenger: The Robots of Sigma 7
Burnt Toast
La Cosa Nostra

I also found a couple through searches:

Space Station Escape
Terminal Terror

If you're interested in any of these, let me know.

[leilei]

I was wondering if you could explain to me what 3dgcs is, and where it comes from and so on. I'm very curious about it.

The 3DGCS is a game development system software sold by Pie in the Sky software between 1994 and 2003 (various versions exist, but the dos version was the most popular) for $69.95 USD. It could only make first person shooters and have one weapon set and one enemy. It used real mode memory.

[Heisanevilgenius]

Wow, that's crazy. Thanks for the info. Let me know if you have any interest in those games I mentioned.

[leilei]

if anyone's wondering, here's a video of a very typical 3dgcs game
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mBpkgogwMIg

[ThreeHeadedMonkey]

Oh, man. That's pretty lame.