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Duke Nukum 5.25 floppy

johnnyblack

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Mar 14, 2011
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I have a Duke Nukum 5.25 floppy and am trying to figure out how rare or collectible this thing is. Hoping someone here would know more about this. Every once in a while I check ebay to see if anyone is selling it or something similar and have had no luck whatsoever. Haven't found much of anything else regarding this out on the web either, which is weird as I would've thought otherwise.

Here are the specifics on the disk I have:

It is a Public Brand Software issued 5.25 floppy, which I'm sure came directly ordered from their catalog. It is titled GV71.0 "Duke Nukum". This is the spelling they used for Duke Nukem a short while when they were worried about the name being already copyrighted.
 
It's probably "rare", but not valuable. It's probably a shareware copy of the first episode of the first volume of Duke Nukum, if I'm not mistaken - lots of various publishing houses spammed out disks in 5.25" and 3.5" formats of any game licensed as shareware - I own several boxed copies of various shareware games on my shelf here - no Duke here (except retail Duke3D), but I'm sure somebody else here could tell you about how they have copies of it on their shelf. That said, it's not worthLESS either, you're just not going to make a fortune or somethin'.
 
Actually, much as I hate to tell you, unless you've the nicely retail boxed shareware games, consider it worthless. And if you do have the retail boxed shareware games, consider them almost worthless.

This is why there are a few of the "Titanium Seal" shareware Apogee games on ebay at astronomical prices, with sellers thinking that they have legitimate retail releases because they're too lazy to read "SHAREWARE" on the packaging, or because they're so dishonest and think their buyers are so stupid that they'll pay the $54.95 that one guy was asking for a Duke Nukem "Sealed" copy for 6+ months (and may even still be there - I haven't looked in awhile)

So why are the shareware copies and distributions virtually worthless? Because the floppy contents do not contain the registered versions. Because the files included therein are to be found on every single shareware compilation that proliferated the CD-ROM market in the early-mid 1990's, are given away on the 3d-Relams site now, and are available for free download all over the net as shareware, as 3d-Realms still actively protects their copyrighted games, even though the vast majority of them are unplayable on modern machines without a virtual environment.

If you've got the registered shareware floppies of any shareware game, but especially those from Apogee or Epic prior to the retail releases (i.e. the mail-ordered ones), you've gold on your hands. Not like $100/copy gold (unless it's Commander Keen - then, maybe)... but a goodly amount. And there's collectors out there that'll pay for it - Phreakindee being one of them, more than likely. Me too, if the price is right (i.e. I can't and won't afford an arm and a leg, but would go original retail or higher, depending upon completeness and condition).

I've shareware disks I bought back in the day and they're actually worth more as a "blank" floppy than as a collectible... though I keep them around simply because I did purchase them from the shareware vendors for $1/disk back in the day. To me, it's a nostalgia of the way that things used to be, same as keeping around my old Packard Bell 486 when I've much better retro systems to play with these days.

Heck, I've even an official shareware floppy distribution set from Apogee circa early 1994. It's 33 disks, and is (unfortunately) missing disk 27 (or 21 - I forget). I picked it up as a unique Apogee collectible and won with zero competition at the starting bid of $9.99. Apogee was in the title, search words, and description - as was Keen and Duke... trust me, these would have come up with any possible Apogee-related search, and it was a 10-day auction. I talked the guy into sending me the original pack-in letter and box with address labels as sent from Apogee even though he didn't want to do so as it contained old info for his old computer store. Even these copies were nothing different than what can be found on the various shareware CDs... except that they are on cool Apogee-logo'd diskettes and have 3 diskettes of screen images that Apogee hand-picked for vendors to market their games.

Outside of the logo and the screen caps diskettes, I only purchased this for the novelty-factor. It's not a gold-mine, and is worthless except to the most fervent collectors, especially in the incomplete capacity. It's amazing to me that they hadn't changed to a CD-ROM distribution by that point in time. I mean, in 1994, they could've gotten CD's pressed for what? $10-12 a piece, MAX, even in fairly small runs (say a few hundred?). Factor in the cost of floppies (figure $3-4 per 10 floppies wholesale), and the cost of shipping 33 floppies verses a single CD, and it's utterly amazing to me... the final reason that I chose to purchase the set.
 
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Thanks for all that info. Some pretty interesting stuff there.

I'm sure it would be more desirable if it were the game company/publisher version instead of from a catalog. Managed to take a couple pics so that you can see exactly what I have:
dukelabel.jpg
dukedisk.jpg


As you can see, it doesn't say shareware on it, but I can't really confirm that its not either. At the time, my mom bought this and didn't realize that our computer wasn't up to spec to run the game. So technically, I've never actually played this.
 
No, it is the V2.0 release of Duke Nukem. The publisher changed the name of the game once they found out another game overseas contained a character named Duke Nukem, and were afraid they would get sued for trademark infringement. As it turned out, this other game never filed for name protection, so during the development of Duke Nukem II (not to be confused with Duke Nukem 1 V2), they reverted to the original name and trademarked it.
 
1-800-426-DISK.

Now THAT I remember :) I didn't recognize the Public Brand Software name, but that phone number - definitely. They're the ones who I used to call for their free catalogs so that I could drool over all the cool software and thumbnail-sized black and white screen caps - then I'd go to our local library (local being a 20-mile drive and begging my Mom to drop me off while she went grocery shopping) and I'd pull up their PC-SIG Shareware Distribution CD-ROM, and try to find all the games I wanted from this catalog and put them on my box full of floppies (that precious box - I only had one at the time.. laugh).

Ah... memories :)

And as Carlsson said, you've the v2.0 release of Duke Nukem (-um) 1 from the original trilogy back before they turned Duke into an idiot w/ the Duke3D release. So not a fan of Doom or Duke3D - stone me to death now, but Wolfenstein is so much better in every respect, not the least of which is that you can actually SEE what you're shooting at, and it didn't need bikini-clad dancers to be cool.
 
and it didn't need bikini-clad dancers to be cool.

You leave Cinnamon out of this! j/k One almost interesting thing to do sometimes on floppies though was to peck around for deleted data. Some interesting stuff lives on when companies didn't clean up their distro prior to release. Also (no idea on this one) but a few shareware versions of games seemed to have the full version on the disk, it was just limiting you to the demo. I don't recall how many (probably very few) but I do recall Doom putting free cds out there which contained the full game if you fixed the patched exe.
 
I have the Quake Episode 1 shareware package that everyone rushed out to buy when somebody released the codes to make them the full version.

Actually the CD had every ID game (shareware) up to the Quake era and you could unlock them all.
 
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I still have some PBS disks, somewhere. As I recall, one of the brands that you'd see displayed in wire racks at computer stores and usually sold for about $3 per disk--all shareware and/or freeware.

A useful distribution channel before the Web.
 
I remember the old traveling computer shows of the 90's had people who just sold shareware compilations at the booths. They also had people selling boxed games very cheap (I think some were supposed to be for europe only or something shady like that).
 
I quit going to those computer shows when computer shopper started shrinking. I liked quite a bit of the old car stereo gear , so many decent brands have bit the dust over the years. Unlike computers and game consoles collecting vintage car stereo gear would not be too much fun since you have no place to install it all. I got into car stereo when it just started getting big and sound-offs were forming.

If I had the space I would collect Technics home stereo equipment from the 90's (DAT, DCC, high end tape decks, etc).
 
Well (crap I just the OT line didn't I) it all runs off 12V so as a friend did you can just use a computer power supply and wire up a custom speaker set and connection and route them all through that and/or a switch box.
 
Well (crap I just the OT line didn't I) it all runs off 12V so as a friend did you can just use a computer power supply and wire up a custom speaker set and connection and route them all through that and/or a switch box.

If you mean 12VDC car stereo gear you would need some car batteries and a trickle charger if you were to use some amps with speakers (like they do at the stores with head units on display). If my computer hobby is any indication my hypothetical 1980's car stereo collection would need a bunch of 1980's cars to go with them ;)
 
I still have some PBS disks, somewhere. As I recall, one of the brands that you'd see displayed in wire racks at computer stores and usually sold for about $3 per disk--all shareware and/or freeware.

A useful distribution channel before the Web.

It certainly was... like many others here, I'm sure, I remember ordering shareware diskettes of some of your products to try out... :)
 
Wow, it is very rare version of Duke Nukum with 5.25" format from PBS.
I used have Duke Nukum with 3.5" from Apogee.
I think there is other reason why developer must call Duke Nukem as Duke Nukum.
 
It certainly was... like many others here, I'm sure, I remember ordering shareware diskettes of some of your products to try out... :)

I was younger than you guys, and from my age-group's perspective our parents would go out and pick up cheap shareware games and then we'd have a week's worth of new entertainment - it used to be so much cheaper to find a good game back then (you could argue that you had to hunt through more crap, but you still do today, lol).
 
And as Carlsson said, you've the v2.0 release of Duke Nukem (-um) 1 from the original trilogy back before they turned Duke into an idiot w/ the Duke3D release. So not a fan of Doom or Duke3D - stone me to death now, but Wolfenstein is so much better in every respect, not the least of which is that you can actually SEE what you're shooting at, and it didn't need bikini-clad dancers to be cool.

I'm actually in agreement here... the older duke nukem games were great. Love the old Bobby Prince music too. Newer versions are total garbage, ugly graphics, bad music, the end :)
 
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