A lot of original DOS games - to the Administrator

[leilei]

Looks like that drew some attention. Soon afterwards, the article was nominated for deletion and speedily deleted.

hehe why am i not surprised?

[MrFlibble]

Of the remaining games, many of them I am certain never had shareware versions, but I have memories or suspicions that some of them did. If anyone can identify any legally distributable games from the remainder of the list, please say so.

4D PRINCE OF PERSIA

4D Prince of Persia is, in fact, a stand-alone modification of the original Prince of Persia (v1.0) by a Russian programmer, Kirill Terebilov. As such, it has never had a demo or a shareware release. It has new, harder levels and a few modified sprites, and, to my knowledge, is considered a classic among user made level sets, but it's by no means an official release.

ALONE IN THE DARK

There's a demo that is limited to only the first room (attic).

ANOTHER WORLD

There's a demo of the hi-res remake of the game by the original author, but I'm not sure if the original release had a demo.

DOOM 2

There seems to be no official demo for this one.

FLASH BACK

There's a one-level demo.

LETHAL TENDER

I think there's a shareware version of this game somewhere.

MORTAL KOMBAT 2

A demo version is known to exist, but I have been unable to find it (all links I found were broken).

PRINCE OF PERSIA

Get the demo here. It has the two first levels of the full game. A demo of Prince of Persia 2 also exists, and features the first level.

SAM & MAX

There is a demo of this game.

SERF CITY

Here. It's limited to one hour of play, low resolution mode and limited world size.

THE ULTIMATE DOOM

Eh... I guess the shareware episode of Doom also qualifies as the demo for this one

WARCRAFT 2

The demo/shareware version of Warcraft II has two short three level campaigns for both Orcs and Humans, which are comparable to, but not identical to the Act I of each campaign in the full game.

X-WING

AFAIK there's only a non-playable demo of this game.

[leilei]

but I'm not sure if the original release had a demo.

It did but only the first level (up to the point just before you're captured) and i've only seen it on a physical Interplay sampler disk (along with a Castles 2 demo)

[DOSGuy]

ALONE IN THE DARK
There's a demo that is limited to only the first room (attic).

That's already on the site: (Alone in the Dark). You can even play it in your browser!

ANOTHER WORLD
There's a demo of the hi-res remake of the game by the original author, but I'm not sure if the original release had a demo.

Oh, indeed there was! There were two or three of them in English, and at least one in French. Actually, the abundance of slightly different demos is the reason why the game never made it to the site: I didn't have time to sort out the mess at the time.

That same problem also kept The Lost Vikings off of the site, even though I wrote a review and chose my screenshot over a year ago. There were just too many damned demos! Some are in English, some are in German... too many demos to examine and catalog is too much of a good thing.

MORTAL KOMBAT 2
A demo version is known to exist, but I have been unable to find it (all links I found were broken).

Oh, hell yeah! Not only did I find the demo, but also a demo of Mortal Kombat 3!

The only mk2demo.zip file I can find admits that it was modified, so I downloaded the "original" source, which was mk2demo.arj, mk2demo.a01, mk2demo.a02, and mk2demo.a03. It looks like AOL was the only source of this archive in the entire world, and everyone else just linked to it. Anyway, I don't want the visitors to have to mess around with a series of four ARJ files, so I rezipped them. I'll hold onto the originals just in case.

X-WING
AFAIK there's only a non-playable demo of this game.

That's correct, and it was super LAME! It's still on the LucasArts FTP if anyone is curious.



Okay, so I've gone back and updated my reply to that post. Also, I'm moving this thread to the Site Suggestions section since it was a request to add games.

[MrFlibble]

MORTAL KOMBAT 2
A demo version is known to exist, but I have been unable to find it (all links I found were broken).

Oh, hell yeah! Not only did I find the demo, but also a demo of Mortal Kombat 3!

The only mk2demo.zip file I can find admits that it was modified, so I downloaded the "original" source, which was mk2demo.arj, mk2demo.a01, mk2demo.a02, and mk2demo.a03. It looks like AOL was the only source of this archive in the entire world, and everyone else just linked to it. Anyway, I don't want the visitors to have to mess around with a series of four ARJ files, so I rezipped them. I'll hold onto the originals just in case.

Cool! I've seen the MK3 demo at DOS Museum, and thought that for some reason it is more widely available. From what I've read, the MK2 demo has two playable and two unplayable characters (Liu Kang, Reptile, Scorpion and Sub-Zero), as opposed to only two characters in the MK3 demo (Sheeva and Jax). Also, I'm not sure about this, but there might be/have been a MK1 demo as well.

That same problem also kept The Lost Vikings off of the site, even though I wrote a review and chose my screenshot over a year ago. There were just too many damned demos! Some are in English, some are in German... too many demos to examine and catalog is too much of a good thing.

Interesting! Do they only differ by language or are there different levels as well?

BTW, did you know that the old Dune II demo is, in fact, playable (to some extent, at least)? If you start it with any command line parameter, it will not switch to the recorded demo mode after the intro, but will allow to command all the units and structures. However, due to the fact that some necessary files are missing, production screens will not work properly. It appears that Westwood intended the demo to be playable at some point, since there's info for some disabled functions (e.g. if you click on the Mentat button, an info screen will appear what the Mentat function is going to do in the full version), but then decided not to do it after all. This information was found thanks to Segra (original message at FED2k Forums).

[leilei]

According to the Wikipedia article about Dream17,

it's about mixed martial arts stuff now

[MrFlibble]

I just found out that FileFront has a sizeable archive of old MicroProse demos and other stuff:

http://www.gamefront.com/files/listing/ ... line/demos

[MrFlibble]

Hi there,

I noticed "Alien Breed-Tower Assault" on this Team 17 fan page, along with other demos:

http://www.dream17.co.uk/downloads.php?cat=4

I just realized that the original Team 17 FTP site is still online with downloads of their demos:
ftp://ftp.team17.com/pub/t17/demos/pc

All of the stuff listed here is still available