CD collecting is a religion

[Hallfiry]

Heya,
I hadn't realized that I forgot to introduce myself.

I'm Hallfiry from Germany. I'm 23 years old as I write this, I study computer science (with questionable success) and through a little evolution since 2008, my main hobbies wound to be collecting Magazines and their Cover-Mounts (as well as misc. samplers if I get my hands on them).

Since I'm a nice guy for most purposes, I feel obliged to share my collection with the world, especially the parts that are hard to come by. Most of my collection is available at KultCDs.com, which I founded 3 years ago (iirc). When it became obvious that my collection is outgrowing easy to handle bounds, I started to shape usable interfaces around it, of which some are basically abandoned now (e.g. the "content search" for magazines) and others that have turned ot to be easy to maintain and provide never before seen amounts of data.

So now my collection is presented primarilly through two interfaces:
The original KultCDs main page that allows viewing magazine collection in a way that was largly inspired by Kultboy.com (from where I also took most of the color scheme, even though I interpret it slightly different). Magazines and their CDs are presented by year and month there, you can view their covers and download links are provided if available.

The second and even more important part (from the perspective of a retro game researcher) is the CD catalog. It's a database of the content of about 3200 CDs from magazines and shareware distributers. I also included a few FTP sites in the database. The catalog allows easy searching for files and folders and most media have a canonical date associated with them. The canonical date (as I coined it in a moment of muse) is basically the date written on the front of a magazine (e.g. 11/96). It is typically 2 months later than the actual CD content. For CDs that do not follow the usual rules of numbering or dating, I assign a more useful date by hand.

I have 5 main sources of CDs, which are:
Archive.org (from there I take mostly Italian and US CDs)
Oldgames.sk (and uloz.to) (for Czech and Slovakian CDs)
abandonware-magazines.org (for French CDs)
shoonay.thecompany.pl and a Polish friend of mine (for Polish CDs)
my own collection (mostly German)

Additionally I sometimes get donations in form of images or physical CDs.

My own collection started from 3 points and I started the full scale CD collection hobby when getting a fourth block.
1. CDs from mags that I bought in my childhood. Those were mostly CBS and GameStar.
2. CDs from my neighbours (mostly PC Action and PC Games
3. CDs from a collection of 55 magazines that I bought for 1€ off ebay back in 2009 or so (mostly PC Games and GameStar)

I really got into the hobby when I went to the recycling yard and found a pretty complete collection of PC Games CDs from 1995 to 1999.
The recycling yard is a place where people can dump waste of certain kinds and I sometimes go there and take away (semi-illegally) CDs that I find interestng. Through this channel, my collection steadily grows and there's always a chance to find rare CDs that people wouldn't even sell on ebay.
You have time imagine it is to me like buying booster packs of a trading card game: I go there every once in a while, look into the box with the CDs see a few hundred random CDs (ofc they are correlated, because people throw away their collecton in whole), and sometimes it's stuff that I need and sometimes it's not.


In addition to providing CDs, I also scan and upload magazines. I'M not the most active scanner of magazines, but I've personally scanned about 200 issues, which would even out to something like 20.000 pages. I'm especially proud of scanning all regular issues of PC Spiel, quite a number of Powre Play issues and lately starting to scan MCV issues. MCV is especially interestng, because it has the perspective of business insider and was not sold publicly.


My CD catalog is not yet widely used, the most active user is probably MrFlibble, but I've noticed that it is usefully indexed through google, so people often find it when searching for filenames.
So yea, I'd say that the CD catalog is currently my most valuable achievement. I hope more people will use it in the future to find information on games and related things.

Long introduction, I know, but I guess since this is my personal through about me as a person, I can write as much as I feel suits me.


Regards,
Hallfiry

[developertn]

Thank you! I am sure my daughter when she is ever born will find these games.

[Hallfiry]

Thank you! I am sure my daughter when she is ever born will find these games.

I will understand this as belonging to the ever so wide realm of sarcasm.

My catalog is meant to be used now. By "future" I mean every moment in time beyond the one I am writing that very word "future". (in ascending time direction that is.)

[developertn]

Actually since I am on an important interview tomorrow, I am being serious. I really appreciate your collection even though I am busy at the moment.