Re: Notable game findings with Hallfiry's coverdisk catalogue
Posted: July 13th, 2016, 12:53 pm
For some reason the playable DOS demo of Screamer Rally is pretty hard to find. Shuffling through archived newsgroup messages lead to a site called 3dfx Mania (which I think is the same thing as the 3D Files). The page at that site mentions a 34 MiB file called srally.zip - which inconveniently coincides with the name of an archive with a demo of a completely unrelated game, Sega Rally Championship.
A catalogue search for "srally" predictably returns a lot of results relevant for Sega Rally Championship - they're all identifiable by the presence of a file called segalogo.bg. However, by almost pure guesswork I determined that this file is the Screamer Rally demo. There are several problems with it though: 1) it's in French, 2) it's zipped up with some version of WinZip that does not unpack well on modern systems (e.g. 7-Zip can't properly extract some files) and 3) the installer expects the source and target directories to be located on different drives (suggesting that this is a covermount demo, not a downloadable one). Other than that, the demo installs and plays as it should.
From the contents of the French zipped demo it became possible to track down all unpacked instances of the demo in the catalogue:
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 62482&o=da
Judging by the media, there's one English and one German version (the series is called Bleifuss in German), and the rest seems to be French stuff. Again, all appear covermount releases, not downloadables.
In addition to the 3dfx Mania site (and this page which also mentions a downloadable srally.zip), there's this really obscure fan page of the game:
http://community.fortunecity.ws/underwo ... 2rally.htm
It suggests that the first demo release was in German and the file was called rallydemo.zip (~ 34 MiB in size), and the English demo came out later, is smaller (~ 17 MiB), and the file is called srdemo.zip. The problem is that a demo of Star Rangers is also called srdemo.zip.
A catalogue search for "srally" predictably returns a lot of results relevant for Sega Rally Championship - they're all identifiable by the presence of a file called segalogo.bg. However, by almost pure guesswork I determined that this file is the Screamer Rally demo. There are several problems with it though: 1) it's in French, 2) it's zipped up with some version of WinZip that does not unpack well on modern systems (e.g. 7-Zip can't properly extract some files) and 3) the installer expects the source and target directories to be located on different drives (suggesting that this is a covermount demo, not a downloadable one). Other than that, the demo installs and plays as it should.
From the contents of the French zipped demo it became possible to track down all unpacked instances of the demo in the catalogue:
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 62482&o=da
Judging by the media, there's one English and one German version (the series is called Bleifuss in German), and the rest seems to be French stuff. Again, all appear covermount releases, not downloadables.
In addition to the 3dfx Mania site (and this page which also mentions a downloadable srally.zip), there's this really obscure fan page of the game:
http://community.fortunecity.ws/underwo ... 2rally.htm
It suggests that the first demo release was in German and the file was called rallydemo.zip (~ 34 MiB in size), and the English demo came out later, is smaller (~ 17 MiB), and the file is called srdemo.zip. The problem is that a demo of Star Rangers is also called srdemo.zip.