Welcome to The DOS Collection!

Release 2: 1981-1990, Part 1 of 2.

What is this?
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Here's a continuation of an archive of DOS games, named in a TOSEC inspired

convention, accurately titled with publisher data and year of release, with flags
for languages, hacked versions, bad dumps and everything else you'd come to expect
in a "full set" of games. We wanted to finally put DOS in the same state of
organization as all the console collections and other computers have enjoyed for
years. Perhaps DOS was just too chaotic; too much work to organize before, but now
that we've started, we hope you'll join in and help too. There's lots to do!

Yes, this collection is similar to other DOS torrents out there. In fact, a lot of
what you see here was originally sourced from other torrents, and we give full
credit and kudos to those who have come before and put in all that work. What we
wanted to do was take it to the next level. We wanted a higher standard of naming
and accuracy, and to fill in the missing gaps. You'll quickly see that this
collection is more than just a re-hash of everything else that's out there. You'll
find several titles that have never been released (to our knowledge) to the
internet, different versions of games, lots of new non-English games, notes about
individual titles, tools to help organize the collection on your hard drive and
more. Eventually we wish to publish screenshot packs, box covers, documentation
and possibly even a GUI front-end to allow you to browse the games via the web and
play them directly on your computer. This is just the beginning.

Part 1 of 2?
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We've realized that not everyone is as dedicated to archiving all things DOS as we
are. Not everyone wants to have every version of every minor hack or crack that
has ever been released. Not everyone wants to clutter up their hard drives with
alternate versions of the same game. So, we've taken the opportunity to split up
the collection into the main release, and a compendium release, which contains all
the alternates, hacks, overdumps and things that won't interest most people. The
companion release will not have any duplicate filenames across the collection, so
you can safely download both and store them in the same folder if you want the
entire (~3600 files) set.

Look familiar?
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Yep. We've released a lot of these files before.
Why are we torturing you and making you download them all again? Well, this
collection is better, bigger, and more accurate. We've cleaned up a lot of titles,
removed a couple viruses that popped into view, removed more BBS ads, added some
really obscure games that have never before been seen on the net. There were so
many changes that we couldn't put out just an update pack, we had to start over
again. Sorry, but when you consider there are ~3600 files in this torrent and it's
roughly 1Gig in size, it's not really that big of a deal.
Oh yeah, we added an entire year's worth of games! 1990. A pivotal year where DOS
gaming bloomed into a platform to be respected. 1990 laid the foundation where VGA
graphics, respectable speed CPUs, and sound cards were the norm. The hardware was
no longer the bottleneck working against the artists' creativity. Shareware steps
up and is showing its colors. The gaming scene explodes from here.
Some notes. (just stop reading when you get bored-these get more and more technical
as we go along)
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1) We want your feedback. The only way to improve the accuracy in this collection
is to get more eyes looking for bugs. If you think you've found an error, please
send us a note in on the wiki pages and let us know. Even better, if you think
you've got a title we're missing in the collection, PLEASE get ahold of us and
we'll roll it into the next release.
We have a wiki available here:http://www.underground-
gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collection

Please use it. It will take you to all kinds of information you may be looking for
about this project.

2) We need more help. This portion of the collection took about 1.5 years to
compile. Certainly things will go faster now that a work flow has been
established, but we're an estimated 1/5th of the way through cataloging the 10,000+
files that are out there. We'd like to see the end of this collection before we
get too old to enjoy any of it. We need people with DOS knowledge, who love games,
and have a critical eye for accuracy. We need people trolling websites and
torrents looking for undiscovered games. We need people who know how to crack
games and how to work with disk and CD images. We need people using DOSCenter to
help find games that we don't already know about.

3) This collection includes shareware titles, commercial release, freeware games,

and everything in between. Some may be bothered by including such things, but we
felt that we couldn't properly archive all that DOS stands for without including
everything made for DOS. There are also some really amazing shareware titles out
there which would be a shame to not include. The distinction between freeware and
public domain games is often too blurry to decide, especially in the early days
when people were programming to show off the capabilities of a new machine, not to
commercialize their work. If it's a game or in some ways entertaining, and it
works in DOS, it's in here. We did try to tag shareware titles with a [SW] label
to help people sort them out if they so choose.

4) There is often a trade-off between playability and accuracy. While we would

love to have a perfectly preserved image of a diskette or CD that a game was
released on with copy protection and disk labels intact, many games were never
distributed on physical media. Diskette and CD images are more klunky to use and
emulation of them is not yet perfect, especially when copy protection tricks are
emulated. We find it more important, at this stage in the collection, to maximize
playability. This means all copy protection must be removed, even if it means
sacrificing a portion of the accuracy of the game's release. This also sometimes
means releasing an installed version of a game, rather than providing the install
utility. Our motto of "unzip and run" supersedes "unzip, mount disk image, start
game, look up documentation, type in correct answer, run".

5) We collected up all the different versions of any game we could find. Is there
a difference between "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter" version 1.0X and version
1.1a? We don't know, but obviously there is enough of a difference that Sierra had
to release another version, so it's enough for us to collect. Likewise, any game
that was published in one country as "game xyz" and in another country as "game
abc" we collected too. Any time a game is different in any way, we put it in the
collection. You may also see games tagged with [a1], [a2], etc. That means these
are alternate versions of the same game. Typically this comes from different ways
of taking care of copy protection, not necessarily different releases (by the
publisher) of the same game. Most of these alternate versions are placeholders
until they can be analysed closely to determine exactly what the differences are.
Likely some of these will disappear from later releases.
Any time no version number was available in the program, we assume it's version
1.0. Therefore, whenever a game says version 1.0, we don't add the version number
to its title, otherwise it would be quite cluttered looking. Likewise with games
in languages other than English. The default is English for all games, so only
when a game is not in English, do we tag the game with whatever language or country
code the game is from. Our main wiki page has the breakdown of all the tags and
flags.

Please also check the DOS Collection Notes wiki page to see if there are any
details as to why a game is tagged as an alternate version:
http://www.underground-gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collection_1979-
1995/notes
http://www.underground-gamer.com/wiki/index.php/Complete_PC_MS-DOS_Collection_1979-
1995/notes1990

6) There are some bad games in the collection. Often these are "bad, but best dump
known" at this time.
Some games are missing some key files, others are not (yet) cracked. Each game in
this condition is tagged as [b1] or [b2], and noted in the notes wiki. This does
not mean that all games not marked as [b1] will be perfectly playable under DOSBox
or on a DOS machine. What doesn't work in DOSBox often works on a true DOS machine
and vice versa. Since no system is perfect, your results may vary. If you think
you've stumbled across something that should be fixed (late in game copy protection
perhaps) then please get ahold of us to take a look.

7) Files included/deleted from the archive. Whenever possible, a cracked version

and an uncracked version of the changed files are provided to help offset the
historical inaccuracies introduced with a cracked game. Look for game.exe and
game.ex_ inside the archive, where the .ex_ version is the untouched copy. Each
file has a file_id.diz inside the archive. This file_id.diz simply re-hashes the
filename, but also explains any tag or flag used in the naming, so that there is no
confusion as to what a (tr en) means or a [h1].
Any time an original file_id.diz was included in the archive (such as titles
released by Apogee) it is renamed to file_id.di_ Non-original file_id.diz's, such
as those created by individuals, or pirate groups, are overwritten.
Whenever possible, we try and clean up a title as much as possible. This means no
BBS ads, courier group .nfo's, savegames, config files or anything else. Nothing
that was there at the time the publisher published the game should be there now.
Please note that the main focus at this time is the collection itself,
additional/unwanted files will slowly be weeded out as additional dumps of games
are made available and comparisons made to generate more known good dumps of games.
Titles currently tagged as [a1] and [a2] due to differences in copy protection can
eventually be merged together to create an untouched copy of the .exe. These are
tasks for later generations.

8) There are some disk images. There are a couple dozen .IMG or .TD0 files
included in the collection. These are mostly placeholders for whenever some
talented individual can make a boot-loader for them and make them run entirely in
DOS. These files are not zipped up, to help them stick out as placeholders, and to
make sure someone doesn't try to unzip-n-run them. A majority of the disks that
have been converted are all tagged as [DC], meaning DOS Conversion, meaning this
game was a PC-Booter and did not use an operating system to be playable, but has
been converted over to work in DOS. It is often time consuming work to convert
them, but there are emulators out there which can also handle booting from them.
Technically since these are not DOS games, they shouldn't even be in the list, but
hey, when you've got 2000 DOS games, what's another 50? There are also some PCjr
specific cartridge dumps in the mix too (.jrc files). These also need to be
converted to run in DOS someday, although likely to only ever work on a PCjr in
DOS.

9) A few games have tags like this: [!] That means "known good dump" which means
that 2 individual copies of the same game were dumped independently and then
verified against each other. These are nice to have, and eventually we'll get more
of them, but the focus is currently on getting a first copy of each game. There
will be more [!]'s as the project progresses.

10) We like mobygames.com. Whenever possible, we've been sticking with the main
title of a game to match the title on mobygames. There are many reasons for this,
the first of which is we believe it is an accurate source of information; all
submissions have to be verified by an approver, so things like subtitles and
spelling errors are typically weeded out by the time the game appears in the
database.
The second and most important reason for matching our titles with moby is that we
can then utilize the other data on the site, without having to do any additional
matching title work. Any web-friendly application could theoretically take a
filename from this collection, drop it into the search engine at mobygames, and be
put directly into the game's summary, with access to screenshots and box cover
scans just a click away. We will be exploring this type of interface in the
upcoming days. Please note that this project is not in any way affiliated with
mobygames or its owners.

11) Viruses. We hate 'em, and whenever something pops up in a scan, we want to
verify it and fix it. We do have to be careful though; some modern scanners will
wrongly accuse a DOS game as some kind of windows trojan due to false alarms. (it
would be very, very difficult to inject a windows based trojan dropper into a DOS
game without completely breaking it) To the best of our knowledge, the collection
is clean. If your scanner goes off on something, please check the release notes
wiki page(s) to check to see if it has already been investigated and found to be
ok. If not, let us know!

12) We have tools now! We've developed a scanning tool similar to ROMCenter or
CMPro which can help organize your collection of games and compare what you have
against ours. It's called DOSCenter, and there is a DOSCenter friendly .dat file
included with this torrent. It has all the knowledge of all the games that we have
gone through so far. (even some yet to be released)

Greets and shouts:

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Underground Gamer, Mobygames, the abandonware sites around the world, the people
who have put hours into their own DOS torrents, the slaves who helped work on this
project, the TOSEC folks for the naming convention, the DOSBox crew, the people who
write programs like ROMCenter, CLRMAMEPro and GoodTools. Thanks especially to the
people who write and distribute these games. If you're a publisher or an author,
we hope that you'll look at this collection as more of an archive of history and
that it supersedes common piracy. This is an attempt to document the evolution of
PC based gaming, not a way to get free games. In other words, please don't sue us
for doing this.