I have picked a total of 19 old shareware games from my personal collection and given them a nice, ready-to-play package. Check it out:

http://the-missing-ink.org/shareware-motherlode.html

What do you think? I'm planning on expanding this collection - I have lots of other ancient titles which I haven't even played myself!

Some description of the included games without having to download the package would be nice. I don't recognise any from the screenshots.

Thks for sharing but it wld be gd to list the games before we need to download them as mentioned by another member. :)

You're right, I need add some more information of what kind of games this is! It isn't the more polished shareware games like Doom and such, but more the random curiousities that people made back then.

List of games:

3-Demon (First-person CGA pacman clone)
Bouncing Babies (catch the falling babies. BW arcade game)
Boxmov (game for people who likes to touch their monitors)
1Pinball
Alien VGA
SneeSnoo Snake
Arena (text-based RPG)
Arcade Volleyball
Bounty Hunter Game
Big Rig 4.0
Kaptajn Kaper i Kattegat (Danish pirate sim from 1989)
XQuest II (Arcade game with really smooth mouse movement)
BlueBalls version 3.0
Advanced Robot War. 1989
Cyberbox II
Catacomb 1990
Catchem 1989
Chopper Commando 2.0
Quatris Pro ver 2.0 1990

Okay, added the text to the description:
http://the-missing-ink.org/shareware-motherlode.html

That's my take. I wouldn't. Not a chance.

Are these your games? If not, do you have permission from the rights holders to distribute them? And do you provide information in the package to contact the rights holders so they can be paid?

Not trying to throw water on the fire, but shareware assumed that the user would pay for the titles.

Back then shareware was kind of an extended demo and if you liked it you could pay the developer to get the whole game. In most cases (at least in most cases that I remember) it was allowed to copy and distribute the shareware in unaltered form.

Of course I have permission - it's shareware! :-)

I'm no different from any other distributor of shareware titles in history - and there's a whole lot. I give the player an option to view read.em files and such. The contact info is often there. A lot of the games have the info before and after the game, too. That said, the info they provided 20 years ago might no longer be valid. Hey, I'm not stopping anyone from paying. But I think it would be a bit unusual to try and pay for those titles several decades after they were posted on some BBS. I mean, I could imagine myself doing it for the sheer insanity, but with a straight face? Really?

Myself, I see it as a legally safe style of abandonware, since the shareware status grants me permission to share the stuff.

If it's really shareware, then he needs about zero permission to distribute them. Would be a damn shame if he did not do it, in fact. Might even be a law somewhere in Texas. Think about it, it does kinda make sense, doesn't it?

Some of them were like that. Others were the complete game, with the expectation / hope that - if the person played it for an extended period of time - the person sent money to the dev / pub.

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I know, I sound like a wet blanket. But it's not much different than so-called abandonware: someone still owns the rights. It's a somewhat gray area for ancient shareware; one could say this package is simply a refreshed effort at distribution, from a 'volunteer'. But for members at a DRM-free site where we want the publishers to trust us and thus offer their wares here for sale, I think we should be particularly attentive to these matters.

So long as the up-to-date contact info is there, and it's made perfectly clear that the person should pay the developer if playing the game for an extended period of time, then it's fine. Or if the rights holder gives the okay for a particular title to transition to freeware.


Edit: actually, on the up-to-date contact info... hmm. It's not the sharer's responsibility, is it? I'm probably looking at this the wrong way. Then again, I'm guessing anybody downloading it has absolutely no intention of paying anyone for the games even though they may not have been changed to freeware. And maybe the rights holders don't care after all this time.

1) I would think that if it's explicitly shareware, then continuing to share the files "as is" shouldn't be an issue. Putting it on a website (without ads) would be the same if I copied Chopper Commando from my 5 1/4 disc and gave it to a friend, even though it's 25 years or so after it was released as shareware.

2) Chopper Commando is an excellent game.

3) If, for whatever reason, you don't feel it's right to download from Kasper's site, DOSGuy from ClassicDOSGames has contacted the author and does have full approval to host the game:
http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Chopper_Commando.html

I don't suppose that's a turn-based, hotseat multiplayer game of magical combat between wizards and their fantasy/folklore-themed minions, and featuring simple color graphics (EGA or VGA)?
(I'm pretty sure the game I'm thinking of was also called "Arena". It wasn't really what I would call "text-based" [EDIT: nor an RPG, for that matter], but....)

Just so we're on the same page and giving OP the benefit of the doubt that all included games are licensed as shareware, sharing them was always the point, entirely.

Edit: removed link to Wikipedia's entry about shareware because I don't intend to appear condescending.