Ok so going through a big sort out at home and I've found a pile of old PC gamer and various other magazine front cover disks. Chock full of demos, patches, mods, map packs, etc.... for a whole slew of games. Thing is I don't really need all of it and I'm not sure what to do with the rest.

Is there a use for old demo disks/DVDs? I know some of the content would be important for some people (Gamershell doesn't have it all and each year we seem to lose more and more download hosts), but otherwise I've really got no idea what to do with them - beyond saving a couple of the DVD boxes for spares and binning the lot.

I have the stored away, dont plan on getting rid of them if i can help it.

I watched a documentary about magicians and this guy had an idea to use them in his act because he had so many of them. It turned out to be a boon for him because while it was just the standard slight of hand fair, the disc reflected like crazy making it look much flashier and drove the audience nuts.

I'd say hang onto the discs for preservation and nostalgia's sake!

I'd certainly rather see whether there's someone you can "donate" the discs to rather than trash them. Maybe ask the patches-scrolls.de guys or something. And frankly I'd rather pay you to send those discs to me than let you trash them. I've actually already uploaded lots of videos from ancient cover discs to YouTube for preservation so yeah, I care about that stuff.

From 1:30 you can see tons of things to do with your discs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgfUI3uano8

Hm, try Jason Scott, he might be interested. The textfiles.com guy, not the actor.

Cherish them.

We've all been here.

F4LL0UT - honestly I'd far prefer to see the stuff preserved and re-distributed where possible. I've always hoped that Steam/Desura/GOG etc... might one day really pick up the banner and host 3rd party produced game addons (honestly I don't know why they don't - new maps and such extend game life for existing customers whilst mods can attract whole new customer bases even for old products).

GOG does a few spotlights and Desura is hosting some but no service really takes it seriously - and those file transfer/download sites often prune out old stuff or simply die.


golea - I've nothing from the 1980s so its all too "new" for Jason Scott/textfiles.com

Save them! You never know what might be found on them, like the hilarious "Pong 6D" parody video on the final edition of the Next Generation disc.

Take a look, some might contain complete games. If no-one owns the rights to them, nothing wrong with opening up a full version and having some fun.

You do know he's spearheaded adding hundreds of magazine demo discs for the past year or so, right? It doesn't matter if they're not from the 1980s. Donate that stuff. He'll still find a use for it.

The Internet Archive has PC gaming cover discs but I don't know how you'd go about contributing to that.