#shareware

Carolina Code Conferencecarolinacodes
2026-03-11

FYI: Classic Games: Solitaire, Scrabble, and Strategy Games : Relive the nostalgia of 1990s gaming with a look at shareware titles. Discover Solitaire, Scrabble, and the Civil War Strategy game that may spark memories. youtube.com/shorts/f-gudLqwyFg

David Cantrell 🏏DrHyde@fosstodon.org
2026-02-26

Is @kagihq the same #Kagi that used to do #shareware registrations?

Carolina Code Conferencecarolinacodes
2026-02-10

ICYMI: Classic Games: Solitaire, Scrabble, and Strategy Games : Relive the nostalgia of 1990s gaming with a look at shareware titles. Discover Solitaire, Scrabble, and the Civil War Strategy game that may spark memories. youtube.com/shorts/f-gudLqwyFg

2026-02-08

Waiting for kickoff… ⏳🏈

Go wayback & play FOOTBALL FOR WINDOWS (Windows 3.1, 1994), made by an ex-college player.

You're the Coach. Pressure's on 😬

📋 Call the plays & try not to blow it as the clock runs out! ⏱️

Preserved and emulated in the browser ➡️ archive.org/details/FOOTFW

#SuperBowl #RetroGaming #Shareware #football

2026-02-04

til: one of the freeware macintosh games i played a LOT as a kid on a mac plus was created by one of the Backblaze founders: Continuum

even better, he self-curates his own continuum page with the original source code in C, assets, game editor, and Q&A/post-mortems

ski-epic.com/continuum_downloa

#shareware #macintosh #vintageApple #retroGaming

A screenshot of the macintosh game Continuum. It shows a small pixel art space ship at the bottom of the screen. The play area is segmented into rooms, separated by walls. In each room there are a couple of enemies, like bouncing balls and laser turrets.

Screenshot courtesy of the macintosh garden
2026-02-04

Heyo all.
Regarding retro gaming again, some of my favorite ones were for ms dos. These include shareware only games too! So, some of them were Mechwarrior 2, I spent more time customizing mechs than actually playing the game, and would often listen to soundtrack on a cd player too!

Other ms dos games of note, include wolfenstein 3d, I made levels and edited sprites in that game as a kid.

Doom of course too, fooled around with modding for it briefly and now I just play levels i find on doomworld and zdoom sites.

Stunts, a fun racing game where you could make your own courses. So much fun!

Quake, also endless levels and modding.

Monuments of mars, fun little 2d platformer.

Descent 1 and 2, great 6 degrees of freedom shooter. Played it online against friends a lot.

Duke nukem 3d. Infamous, but the level editing for it was so easy to do and game itself was pretty fun, especially playing with and against friends online!

Commander keen. Fun little platformer as well.

Skyroads. Great f zero style game!

Corncob 3d. Fun flight sim, you could even get out of the plane and walk wherever on foot.

MegatronVGA. Mech game where you fought mechs in a maze.

Sango fighter, fun street fighter clone.

One must fall 2097, great street fighter clone with awesome music.

Epic pinball, fun pinball game!

Lemmings, great puzzle game.

Stellar 7 and nova 9, battlezone style games that actually had a plot and powerups you could activate and hidden warps and other fun things.

I played all these games and more on a Radio Shack Tandy 1000. Great machine!


#trackers #dos #pinball #Msdos #retrogaming #gaming #shareware #floppies
Carolina Code Conferencecarolinacodes
2026-01-30

Classic Games: Solitaire, Scrabble, and Strategy Games : Relive the nostalgia of 1990s gaming with a look at shareware titles. Discover Solitaire, Scrabble, and the Civil War Strategy game that may spark memories. youtube.com/shorts/f-gudLqwyFg

2026-01-20

back in the early pandemic, with way more time spent in my apartment than was healthy, i decided to run a solo podcast about 90s gaming on the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and MS-DOS. my aim was introducing a level of technical and historical detail not often found on general audience video game podcasts.

each episode took 10-20 hours of research and writing to explore in depth. i tried to pick less popular games that hadn't been talked about much, were underrated, or fascinating from a programming perspective.

in 2022 we moved, i began new programming projects, and the podcast went on the shelf. i always meant to get back to it, and received many e-mails about future episodes.

today i'm relaunching the podcast.

website link:
podcast.vga256.com

rss link:
podcast.vga256.com/rss.xml

apple podcasts link:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/

feedburner link:
feeds.feedburner.com/Multimedi

while i write the next episode, please enjoy some of the earlier episodes, including everyone's beloved SimAnt (episodes 14 and 15).

here are some box and browsies shots of SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (Maxis, 1991) for 16-bit windows. i use the physical boxes and their documentation during research and writing. this has a 150+ page manual, which is 50% ant science!

#dosGaming #msdos #ants #vintageApple #macintosh #shareware #podcast

The big box version of SimAnt for Windows. It shows the window logo on the spine, and the front cover is a 3D rendered perspective of a black ant and red ant fighting on a lawn in front of a bungalow home.The documentation for SimAnt, left to right:

Maxis Software Toys Catalog
SimAnt Manual
SimAnt technical manual
Disk exchange offer and product registration cards
Two low density diskettes.Two pages from the SimAnt manual. The pages describe the various parts of anatomy of an ant, including the thorax and abdomen. There are line art drawings of the outlines of ants to illustrate each anatomical structure.A page from the SimAnt manual, showing a cartoon labelled Trophallaxis Funnies.

It shows two ants in the kitchen of their home. One ant carries a briefcase asking, "What's for dinner honey?"
The other ant, wearing a skirt and stirring a pot on the stove replies, "Oh, the same old crop."

Cue laugh track.
2026-01-19

Peter Cartwright, creator of Classic Mac game EV Override has passed. Override was the game that first showed me that you could fit a whole world in one of these 'game' things. I probably only spent a few summer hours inside actually playing the original Override in the Mac lab, but it made a powerful impression that lasts to this day. Thanks PAC. #retrocomputing #vintageapple #shareware

2026-01-13

my first retrocomputing local pickup of 2026: an Apple Newton MessagePad 120.

almost passed on this one, as i'm more interested in an MP2100. but the seller's photo showed that it was running NewtonOS 2.0, which meant that it is an apple-upgraded MP120 with an 8MB ROM.

this is a rather huge upgrade, because it provides the exceptional Rosetta handwriting recognition (and mercifully puts an end to the lame simpsons meme)

thanks lunar. i *will* remember my shareware feel!

#newton #vintageApple #retroComputing #vintageComputing #shareware

the owner holds a Newton MessagePad 120 in his hand. It has booted to a modal window that reads "Lunar installed OK! remember your shareware feel"

Made a post-jam slightly updated version of Space Cats with redefinable keys and joystick support, among other things. Thanks to my nephew Ed for finding a glaring bug no one had yet spotted (you could fly through the doors in level 3 without keys! Wrong wall tiles, bah)

crussel.itch.io/attack-of-the-

#DOSember #shareware #dosgames

2025-12-24

Happy Holidays! On Monday evening, I streamed a couple of Christmas-themed Shareware CDs. Hardly any of it worked, but it was a ton of fun regardless. If you have a few hours to kill and want to see me corpsing at an alarmingly squelchy MIDI, please enjoy: twitch.tv/lunarloony/v/2650488

#twitch #stream #vod #christmas #shareware

N-gated Hacker Newsngate
2025-12-22

The "golden age" of indie software is as relevant today as floppy disks and physical cheques! 🙄 Apparently, coding isn't just about writing lines of code anymore—who knew? 🤔 The for the '80s, when was king and cheques reigned supreme, is downright touching... if you’re into that sort of archaic charm. 💾✉️
successfulsoftware.net/2025/12

Le site de Korbenkorben.info@web.brid.gy
2025-12-19

Commander Keen - Le code source enfin libéré pour les 35 ans du jeu qui a lancé id Software

fed.brid.gy/r/https://korben.i

<p><strong>Commander Keen</strong>, je pense que pas grand monde ne s'en souvient car c'est tellement vieux !! Pour vous rafraichir la mémoire, c'est ce petit gamin au casque de football américain et sa pogo stick qui fait des bonds partout !</p>
<p>Si ça vous parle c'est que vous êtes assez vieux pour avoir connu les débuts d'id Software. Alors vous serez content d'apprendre qu'un passionné du nom de K1n9_Duk3 vient de libérer le code source &quot;reconstruit&quot; des épisodes 1 à 3, pile pour les 35 ans de la série.</p>
<p>Avec ce projet, si vous compilez le code source avec les bons outils d'époque, vous obtiendrez des exécutables 100% identiques aux originaux. Identiques au bit près une fois compressés avec LZEXE ou PKLITE et cela mes amis, ça veut dire que K1n9_Duk3 a réussi à reconstituer exactement ce que John Carmack et sa bande avaient codé en 1990, simplement en analysant les binaires.</p>
<p>J'vous passe les détails techniques que
<a href="https://pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=18248">vous pouvez retrouver ici</a>
, mais sachez que si vous voulez compiler tout ça, vous aurez besoin de Turbo C++ 1.00 (et surtout pas la 1.01 qui génère du code légèrement différent !) ainsi que Turbo Assembler 2.0 ou supérieur.</p>
<p>Et ce qui est amusant dans l'histoire, c'est que le code de Keen 1-3 réutilise pas mal de bouts de Dangerous Dave, The Catacomb et Hovertank, des projets sur lesquels les futurs fondateurs d'id Software bossaient quand ils étaient encore employés chez Softdis
2025-12-14

25 years later i still find Avernum's character portrait artwork charming and unpretentious

it has that Photoshop 3.0 look - 256 colours with pillow-shaded tones and default brush softness

now that tools and styles have moved towards hyper-accuracy and realism, no one really does this style of digital art anymore

#art #1990s #shareware #retroGaming

A screenshot from Avernum 1 by spiderweb software.

It's an interface in four panels. Top left: an isometric game with four characters standing in a room with an alter

Top Right: four party members that have been hand-illustrated by a novice artist.

Bottom right: a character inventory interface, showing a handpainted character with inventory items in its inventory slots
2025-12-13

Guten Morgen zusammen,
wünsche euch einen tollen und #stressfreien #Samstag
Heute ist u.a. #Tag der #Shareware
Passt auf euch auf und seid #achtsam

2025-12-01

jobs demoing a codeless UI using NeXT/OpenStep's Interface Builder at macworld expo in 1997

making games in Adventure Game Studio taught me how fast games can be built when designers spend their time working on scenes and gameplay instead of coding scrollbar and button behaviour

i admire and get inspiration from hypercard for the same reasons.

youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY

i'm trying to implement something similar for my little game construction kit, called Exigy. if you've got UI suggestions on how to do this well, i'm all ears!
exigy.org

#exigy #shareware #indiegamedev #macintosh #hypercard

2025-11-27

🏈🖥️ Ready to call the plays? In Football for Windows, created by an ex-college player, you step in as coach & run the game your way. It was once free to copy & play (with a $25 registration to unlock everything) — and now you can play it instantly in-browser at the @internetarchive ➡️ archive.org/details/FOOTFW

#shareware #retrogaming

2025-11-14

@GamesMissed as promised - @burgerbecky's port of Ultima I for the Apple IIGS.

i am fascinated by this one, because i bought it directly from Joe Kohn, who ran Shareware Solutions II as a web (mail) order business in the 2000s. it arrived exactly as you see here: in a white envelope, with manuals printed on a laser printer.

sadly, joe passed away in 2010. but his happy Apple IIGS legacy lives on in the form of a website which carries all issues of his Apple II-centric magazine:
wannop.info/SSII/SSII_Index.ht

#apple #vintageApple #appleIIGS #retroGaming #retroComputing #ultima #shareware

A laser printed shareware edition of Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness.

Pictured are an Apple IIgs Reference manual, and Ultima player's guide.

To the right is the small envelope for the printed materials, and a 3.5-inch diskette.
BC BY-NC-SABCBYNCSA
2025-11-02

Jake Kaufman – Ultionus: A Soundtrack of Petty Revenge

CC BY-NC-SA (#CreativeCommons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike)
virt.bandcamp.com/album/ultion

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