remember demo disks?

froog

back in the day you could get oftentimes up to 10 demos of current games on a disk free with the various pc gamer mags. good times.

irishmover

Better yet, local shop used to stockpile a whole heap of demos behind the counter.

Couple times a week they'd let me look through and grab whatever demos I wanted before they threw them out. Was brilliant..

Skerries

I still have a pile of them that I never actually got a chance to look through, but they were invaluable back in the day when I didn't have a fast network connection and they would have game patches on the disk

Duggy747

Found an ancient disk at the weekend that I know has a demo of Carmageddon 2 on it plus tons more stuff, will have to look at it this evening.

I remember I could never get that demo to run right on my Gateway, no matter how much I tweaked with the settings it ran like dog shít. Though I did manage to disable the 5 minute demo timer on it somehow, some setting in a .cfg file maybe.

jumbobreakfast

On the Amiga we had to make do with floppy discs for the most part. Some of them used to squeeze multiple discs onto each floppy that you had to extract to blank discs:
http://www.oldgamemags.com/files/magazines/amiga-user-intl/AmigaUser-1994-10.jpg

Skerries

I have a ton of those Amiga demo disks as well that I was going to donate to a website that archived them but never bothered in the end

kingtiger

yes I remember getting Doom \ Hexan \ Rise of the Triads \ Duke Nukem shareware on those discs, you could play around nine full levels on Doom for free

those where the days

quarryman

Duggy747 wrote: »

Found an ancient disk at the weekend that I know has a demo of Carmageddon 2 on it plus tons more stuff, will have to look at it this evening.

I remember I could never get that demo to run right on my Gateway, no matter how much I tweaked with the settings it ran like dog shít. Though I did manage to disable the 5 minute demo timer on it somehow, some setting in a .cfg file maybe.

Brilliant demo. I remember by the time I got my hands on the full game I was burnt out of it as I'd played the demo to death.

Duggy747

quarryman wrote: »

Brilliant demo. I remember by the time I got my hands on the full game I was burnt out of it as I'd played the demo to death.

Managed to get Carmageddon 1 demo somehow and played that relentlessly, such a fun game that was.

"I was in that waaaaar!!"

Shiminay

I recall a disk that had an obscene number of mods, models, skins, etc for Quake and Quake 2. Not even half of them worked properly. These things were great though cause it meant that when you were still on a 28.8 kbps modem connection like I was, you still had new swag to play around with if you were bored and couldn't afford the 60+ minutes it'd take to download a tiny mod.

ríomhaire

I played the demo for Resi 2 so many time trying to push to get as far as possible in that time limit.

TerrorFirmer

Back in the glory days of 56k and worse, those discs were fantastic for game mods. The funny thing is, back then, I used to play all kinds of demos to absolute death. Now I generally don't bother with demo's even when they are available. If it's getting decent feedback I just buy it.

ríomhaire

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Back in the glory days of 56k and worse, those discs were fantastic for game mods. The funny thing is, back then, I used to play all kinds of demos to absolute death. Now I generally don't bother with demo's even when they are available. If it's getting decent feedback I just buy it.

Well there's so much more info now available now for stuff. In the past it was pretty much magazine coverage, demo discs and if you new someone who played it. Now it's those things, game sites that you can access for free, a million forums, a billion blogs and hundreds of youtube videos.

Also as time has gone on it's likely you now have more money and less free time.

Sierra Oscar

Anyone remember having to update graphics drivers and whatnot using those discs? Those were the days.

Steam was like a nightmare when it came along requiring online updates with 56k.

Canis Lupus

quarryman wrote: »

Brilliant demo. I remember by the time I got my hands on the full game I was burnt out of it as I'd played the demo to death.

Same thing for me with Rise of Nations. Demo was so good when I bought the actual game I spent only a week playing it before I couldn't be bothered with it any more.

Banjo

Ah the halcyon days of Commodore Format and it's cover tape with 1 free game you'd otherwise never have played and a handful of demos and code from an article near the back that you'd load up so your parents couldn't claim that all you ever did was play games. "look, mam!" you'd say, "poke and peek! I'm a hacker!" and then you'd play Cybernoid 2 for 6 hours straight, never getting past the 4th screen. You could fry an egg... if you had an egg...

Satori Rae

I still have all my ps demos from back in the day

brevity

Loved the demo disks. I played the SiN one to death.

nesf

Banjo wrote: »

Ah the halcyon days of Commodore Format and it's cover tape with 1 free game you'd otherwise never have played and a handful of demos and code from an article near the back that you'd load up so your parents couldn't claim that all you ever did was play games. "look, mam!" you'd say, "poke and peek! I'm a hacker!" and then you'd play Cybernoid 2 for 6 hours straight, never getting past the 4th screen. You could fry an egg... if you had an egg...

Heh, same with the long dead Sinclair User. My mother still refers to all computer games as "tapes." It confuses the hell out of my son.

Yakuza

Tapes, pshah. I typed my games in by hand...

10 Print "This sucks"
20 Goto 10

Good times...

TerrorFirmer

brevity wrote: »

Loved the demo disks. I played the SiN one to death.

Ditto. Played that bank level a thousand times. Never actually ended up playing the full game in the end, still have it though. Fired it up for a few minutes a short while back and it's still very playable.

Shame that SiN Episodes was canned as well. Never bothered playing the first episode after hearing it was cancelled even though I also own it.

Amalgam

Shiminay wrote: »

I recall a disk that had an obscene number of mods, models, skins, etc for Quake and Quake 2.

Turning Quake into a racing car game, or a full conversion like Quake: Zerstörer, happy for the afternoon.

Sometimes you'd get demos that were better than full the game, because they were short and sweet, I loved the Blood II demo.

jcrowbar

Banjo wrote: »

Ah the halcyon days of Commodore Format and it's cover tape with 1 free game you'd otherwise never have played and a handful of demos and code from an article near the back that you'd load up so your parents couldn't claim that all you ever did was play games. "look, mam!" you'd say, "poke and peek! I'm a hacker!" and then you'd play Cybernoid 2 for 6 hours straight, never getting past the 4th screen. You could fry an egg... if you had an egg...

Commodore Format! There's a blast from the past. The Big Brain and Roger Frames were the business.

nesf

Yakuza wrote: »

Tapes, pshah. I typed my games in by hand...

10 Print "This sucks"
20 Goto 10

Good times...

Borrowing books from the library, converting the basic to whatever form of basic you needed to use and then spending hours typing it in only to know exactly how the game panned out?

Yeah, kids these days have it on a bloody plate!

Duggy747

I remember a very early Quake II demo from a PC Live! mag. It had a bug in it where if you shot at the feet of enemies with the super shotgun it sent them flying like a rocket.

I actually preferred that demo to the standard one because of little funny things like that in it :pac:

Skerries

there was a great little demo on an amiga disk of Sensible Soccer that instead of a ball they had a grenade that would explode, so you had to try and get rid of it before it went off

there was also another sensi soc demo but set in the black and white television football days

froog

Skerries wrote: »

there was a great little demo on an amiga disk of Sensible Soccer that instead of a ball they had a grenade that would explode, so you had to try and get rid of it before it went off

there was also another sensi soc demo but set in the black and white television football days

oh man, sensi, what a game!

the "sweet spot" on the halfway line you could score a screamer!

enfant terrible

Yakuza wrote: »

Tapes, pshah. I typed my games in by hand...

10 Print "This sucks"
20 Goto 10

Good times...

I had an Amstrad 464+ when I was about ten and used to type out pages and pages of code from the back of a massive book that came with it.

This took hours, then finally after fixing all the errors it would run and I played the game for a while until I got bored.

Then turned it off and lost everything I typed out

Could I if i had known how too saved it to a a cassette tape?

Amalgam

enfant terrible wrote: »

Could I if i had known how too saved it to a a cassette tape?

In one word, yes. I did the very same on an Oric 48K, the original (pre Atmos) white and blue chiclet keyboard model.

One of the worst experiences was getting claw like cramp from typing in a game that turned out to be a downhill skier of some sort. The letter A had to avoid the letter T's. I nearly puked from the rage.

Having said that, I typed in a great game called, Hiresalt City for the Oric (A. Gordon), a Tron lightcycle type game, that I loved.

Beefy78

Skerries wrote: »

there was a great little demo on an amiga disk of Sensible Soccer that instead of a ball they had a grenade that would explode, so you had to try and get rid of it before it went off

there was also another sensi soc demo but set in the black and white television football days

I remember that. It was a cross-over of Sensible Software's two main titles - SWOS & Cannon Fodder.

One of my all-time top 20 games was one which I got free on tape on a games magazine - Chaos by Julian Gollop

nesf

Beefy78 wrote: »

I remember that. It was a cross-over of Sensible Software's two main titles - SWOS & Cannon Fodder.

One of my all-time top 20 games was one which I got free on tap on a games magazine - Chaos by Julian Gollop

You do know he's working on a remake/reboot/new version of Chaos?

Reggie.

Oh the memories

Skerries

nesf wrote: »

You do know he's working on a remake/reboot/new version of Chaos?

I have that original cover tape and played it to death, that's why I backed the Kickstarter at the Wizard lord level as to pay back some of the brilliant value I got out of that game

Yakuza

nesf wrote: »

You do know he's working on a remake/reboot/new version of Chaos?

One of the best games ever (along with Way of The Exploding Fist on the C64). I have a Spectrum emulator for the PC that came with PCFormat and Chaos was on it.

ShooterSF

enfant terrible wrote: »

I had an Amstrad 464+ when I was about ten and used to type out pages and pages of code from the back of a massive book that came with it.

This took hours, then finally after fixing all the errors it would run and I played the game for a while until I got bored.

Then turned it off and lost everything I typed out

Could I if i had known how too saved it to a a cassette tape?

I had that book too!! Triangles flying around the screen Ended up getting Werewolf of London and just playing the crap out of it.

NakQuada

God all this demo disks reminded me of the excitement of getting PC Zone along with the latest update for Half-Life - 1.0.0.x

Oh the memories!

Oh the sadness!

PC Zonnnnneeeee!

Trine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzAylE7MBY