RGB Classic Games Forum

Any other shareware sites from the mid-to-late 90's that are still kicking in 2010?

RULE: Must have existed in full form between 1994 and 2000 and not dumped any files.

STILL AROUND:
Tucows
Download.com (shocker! if you dig a bit you'll find the good stuff)

AROUND, BUT DUMPED ITS LEGACY FILES:
Jumbo.com
ZDNet (Links regressed, and now hosts nagware all over the place, requires US registration to download anything, and even then, links to old files are still completely broken and regressed)

NOT AROUND (Rest in peace!):
Happy Puppy (I think we know the story on this one arleady)
GamesDomain.co.uk (Yahoo!alized, summarily extinguished into another oberon games portal)
Gamehead (well, that one died in Nov 1997 early on)
Walnut Creek CD-ROM (which mirrored happypuppy and gamesdomain's ftp)
ftp.sunet.se's games section (closed around 2006, hosted less and less as sites closed. it's possible the files may still exist, i know they transferred their planetquake ftp mirror to gamers.org years after its close)
3dgamers

No way! My Google searches for old games sometimes bring up results from download.com, but I can never get to a download. Thanks for the link, leilei!

Poor Walnut Creek. All that's left now is the record of all of the awesome files that used to be on it.

I should mention Download.com repacks some of the DOS game installers as pre-installed versions like the Hexen demo. Win32 ones i'm not sure about, those are usually self-contained installers unmodified. Some zips are missing and some are replaced by something else completely (Future Shock demo is now FLYING SAUCER DEMO TRIAL!!!)

MBNet.fi also retains a large amount of its old game download catalogue and has a lot of the files other sites don't have, but it requires a subscription to access and it is restricted to the region of Finland only. You can't even bugmenot your way through.

Really? I've been able to login from Canada, though I haven't tried in a year or two.

leilei wrote:I should mention Download.com repacks some of the DOS game installers as pre-installed versions like the Hexen demo. Win32 ones i'm not sure about, those are usually self-contained installers unmodified. Some zips are missing and some are replaced by something else completely (Future Shock demo is now FLYING SAUCER DEMO TRIAL!!!)

I've seen many instances where Dos games were repackaged into Windows installers, and some of
the worst ones try to get you to install toolbars and other such useless garbage. I play Dos games
on my cellphone (anDosBox) and it ### when I have to unpack the game on my Windows box and
transfer it via sd card to my phone instead of just downloading to the device directly and unzipping
it there.

leilei wrote:MBNet.fi also retains a large amount of its old game download catalogue and has a lot of the files other sites don't have, but it requires a subscription to access and it is restricted to the region of Finland only. You can't even bugmenot your way through.

Proxies are your friend

Last time I checked MBnet.fi requires you to have a magazine subscription in order to access many of their files.