Early Alpha/Beta/demo versions

Pisarz

Yes I still have it; I can dig it up next time I'm in town. It's part of a pamphlet that has other games advertised in it.

Thank you! It would be nice to recover a piece of this game's history. We could even make a Wiki!

Mad Reaper

i think i still have the demo on my old pc i deletet it sure but i can recover them them back ! ^^
i allrady recoverd so much datas thats is no problem is see what i can do guys.

lew

Hi,

I came here looking for a game from my childhood

I believe that:
a) It was an early demo I was playing as a child
b) I still have that disc at my parent's house

I'm not really sure why the f- it was even a thing but I came into possession of it sometime around 2003 by buing a brand-new copy of a niche Polish gaming magazine, or so I thought...

After I removed the foil I noticed some things:

The thick "magazine" was two-pages long with a cardboard inside
Inside of the cardboard there were 8 (!) CDs
All of them were from some german gaming magazine dated back to '97-'99
None of them, including those metioned on the cover were full versions

Other than the Machines i remember playing Half Life 1 (also a demo of a beta version, I think).

I'm worried that ~20-year old disc can be hard if not impossible to read but even if so - I'm gonna keep you updated.
And of course I won't be able to - I can send it by post to anyone willing to perform data recovery on their own.

EDIT: I've just found the post Pisarz was talking about:
https://www.gry-online.pl/S043.asp?ID=11665448
Yeah, it is the same demo, the person who wrote it also had it from this shady "gaming magazine". :'D

BTW. I think this topic should be renamed to "Early Alpha/Beta/demo versions" ^^

Pisarz

@lew

BTW. I think this topic should be renamed to "Early Alpha/Beta/demo versions" ^^

Done!

We currently have no information about this material, except @Aquarillis who said that still has some promotional material that was scanned a long time ago. The rest is scattered in this forum.

The forum is not dead, but its activity is irregular.

I don`t have the knowledge to manipulate the data from your disk, but some of us might be able to (@Judas @bilal @M123 @Hayden).

lew

A quick update.

The good news is I haven't forgot about this thing. ;)
The bad news is - I haven't found (yed) the disc I was talking about.

Buuut, I stumbled upon other disc from the same issue of this gaming "magaine":

I think (and hope!) that the disc with the demo is still somewhere at my parent's house. I'm gonna keep looking. :)

According to the PCGames website Machines demo was present on the disc of the 05/1999 issue:
http://www.pcgamesdatabase.de/pcgames.php?mag=pcgames&vol=05/1999#pcgames

http://www.kultcds.com/index.php?id=pcgames&lang=en

lew

Another update.

I asked Moritz, the administrator of the Kult Cover Disks and he not only answered, but to my amazment - attached not one but three (!) versions of the demo! :D

"I happen to have a few copies of PC Games 05/99 on my shelf. I quickly checked and found that is particular demo is also featured on PC Player 06/99 B and GameStar 06/99 Bonus CD. Its cab file is dated to 1999-02-23. A more common demo dated to 1999-01-14 can be found on the following CDs:
PC Fun CD 49_2
PC Action 04/99
CDA (35) 04/99
Gambler (28) 04/99A
Generation 4 CD 121
Generation 4 CD 139_1
The Games Machine #060
Reset #24 04/99
Excalibur 69
GameStar CZ 04/99 CD1
Level 03/99
Online Today 07/99
Computer Games Strategy Plus #102

Additionally, there's a very rare version from 1999-02-19 that can be found on PC Gamer (Italian) CD #041 B.

Moritz"

For download go to Demo versions (contains early / beta stuff) topic.

:D

Pisarz

@lew This is excellent! Great news indeed! As soon as I can I'll see if it works. Thank you :)

M123

@lew Nice, thanks lew (and Moritz!).

If the demo installers behave similarly to the one for the released game, they might only work reliably on Windows XP / earlier.

lew

@M123 They are but you can always use UniExtract unpack the archives without using the installer. :)
https://www.legroom.net/software/uniextract (older version - 1.6.1) or https://github.com/Bioruebe/UniExtract2 (new version 2.0)

Pisarz

Not lucky :(
My PC had to be repaired, so I probably have to start from zero installing certain things that I had installed for the final game.

lew

@Pisarz any luck? :)

Pisarz

@lew Hi!
I recently had many issues to handle (moved to another apartment, etc.). Yet, I managed to recover all the files from my PC, and the game (final product, not the demos) works OK :)

I'll see what I can do. Sorry for the delay.