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Friday, 9 February 2024

Dad's Demo Disc Collection // Episode 1 - Planet PC Issue 6


So my dad passed away over a year ago now unexpectedly from a heart attack. I was very close to him and the past year has been tough, especially since my dad was a hoarder. It's taken me just over a year to finally clear out his house and get it sold. I lived with him for a long time before finally moving out in 2019 and after that the hoarding got exponentially worse without me throwing things out.

Amongst the hoard there was a lot of crap but there was also a lot of very interesting things. Dad was very big on PCs throughout the 80s and 90s and would make a lot of his own programs in DBase or Clipper. He was very much sold on DOS and by the time Windows 3.1 came around he was too set in his ways and hated it but kept buying PC Magazines until the early 2000s when he eventually lost interest in computing all together. 

Back then, PC Magazines always came with a disk each month with software demos on it, or fonts, clip art, games etc. I remember some of these disks as he would keep them in his shed and I would pick up a handful and go through them one by one on the family computer that was kept in the dining room.

I've found more boxes of disks than I can remember him having, and there's a lot of interesting things on these disks and I thought it would be a nice project to archive every single disk and upload the contents to internet archive and document that journey.

So welcome, to the first episode of Dad's Demo Disc Collection. I started off with a random box and took out the first disk which just so happened to be:
  • Planet PC Issue 6 - 19th April 2000
I eventually got the software working by using PCem: 

A full blown pc emulator. I ended up emulating a Pentium II computer running Voodoo 3 and Windows98. And I did that by following this great tutorial by PhilsComputerLab: 

You can find a zip of the disc here on Internet Archive: 

I especially enjoyed my first encounter with Sierra Home. I look forward to finding other Sierra Software.

Enjoy.




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