Originally Posted by Galaxy (Post 488360)

Does anyone know what was on the disks?

Originally Posted by Fred Fish

For several weeks now there has been an ongoing discussion on
Usenet concerning the status of the "public domain Ogre" which
has been distributed over usenet a couple of times in the last
few years, and which was ported to the Amiga and posted to
usenet early this year.

It appears that this work infringes on copyrights and trademarks
held by Steve Jackson games of Austin Texas. Thanks to several
people who provided me with contact information for Mr. Jackson,
I was able to finally get in touch with him earlier today and
discuss the status of this material.

Based on that discussion I am recalling the disk number 57 from
my Amiga Freely Redistributable Software Library (aka "Fish Disks")
and asking all recipients who received the disk directly from me to
return it for replacement. The new disk will be disk 97, and
will be available in a few days.

If you received a disk number 57 from someone other than me you
should erase your disk and contact that source for replacement.
Please do not continue to propagate any disks numbered 57, and
in particular do not propagate a modified version of disk 57.
The disk with the remaining material is being reissued with a
new number to avoid confusion.

Originally Posted by Fred Fish

I have just spoken with Martin Murray, president of Inovatronics,
11311 Stemmons Freeway, Suite 7, Dallas Texas, concerning the
contents of disk number 80 in my library of Amiga software.
It appears that some dastardly individual took a copy of a
commercial product of theirs, modified it to remove the
copyright messages, and then released this modified version
on one of the BBS's that I collected material from in the course
of organizing this disk. Naturally, we are both VERY concerned
about this, and the effect that it might have on the commercial
value of their product. The programs in question are in the
directory "Tools" on disk number 80.

[...]

[LATE NEWS FLASH --- When it rains it pours, as they say....]
Right after I wrote this file out but before I could post it, I
received a call from Gary Samad of Software Visions Inc., the
author of the excellent MicroFiche Filer program (he sent me
the demo copy which was released on disk number 88). It seems that
on the same disk that there is a program named "snap", which contains
binary code compiled from source code that was developed by someone
under contract to Software Visions. Gary has requested that the
"snap" program be removed from distribution, so all comments above
concerning disk number 80 and the directory "tools" apply equally
to disk number 88 and the "snap" directory. It hasn't been a fun
day folks....

Originally Posted by Fred Fish

This note is to inform the net that the following disks are being
recalled and should not be distributed until replacement disks are
available:
173, 221, 230, 238, 305, 324

Each of these disks contains a tetris clone which Spectrum Holobyte
believes to be infringement on their commercial product "Tetris".

[...]

I intend to deal with the recall of these disks slightly differently
than the previous disks which were recalled. In this case, I will
simply remove the contested material and reissue the disk with the
same number but a slightly different name. The name of disk 324 for
example will change from AmigaLibDisk324 to AmigaLibDisk324a to signify
a revised edition of the disk. The revised disks should be available
after this weekend.

Originally Posted by LocalH (Post 957995)

Sorry for the five-and-a-half year bump, but for those who may be interested in this topic, I felt it was worth bumping based on finding a bit of additional information that would pretty much bring the whole situation almost full circle (full circle of course being finding copies of the actual disks). I may have found a source for disk 80 that includes the "tools" folder (although I don't know if the possible offending material within that folder was removed, as this source also has a disk 57 but without the "ogre" folder).

I was recently going through my old FrozenFish CD (ahh, good old KingFisher 1.x) and came across the entries for 57, 80, and 88 stating that they'd been removed. Since I'd remembered this from the old days but never quite knew why, I figured I'd go on a search for info. One of the results brought me to this thread. Further searching found the original Usenet posts to comp.sys.amiga where Fred recalled the disks. What better source for such information than right from the horse's mouth (or I guess in this case, the Fish's mouth? :spin)

Here, Fred recalls disk 57 and explains in pretty good detail why.


There was also a decent discussion of the issue that at least partially led to Fred investigating the issue and pulling the disk.

Disks 80 and 88 are a little more interesting. The same posting details both recalls.


Now, as far as the source I mentioned earlier. This site has almost all Fish disks in DMS format (although there are a few missing that weren't pulled by Fred, and unfortunately 88 is completely missing). The Contents link for disk 57 does not list the "ogre" folder, but it also doesn't list the "shm" folder that replaced it on disk 97, so no hope there. However, the Contents link for disk 80 does list the "tools" folder.

I was also doing some further reading, and it appears there were other issues with disks later on, but they were handled differently - instead of reissuing with a different number, Fred reissued the same disks with the problematic material (in this case, Tetris clones) removed and with an "a" added to the disk number.


I can verify that my FrozenFish CD does not contain the Tetris clones at issue, and at least from looking at the Contents for disks 173 and 221, those disk images do appear to contain the clones (well, disk 221 from the link has a folder called "Steinschlag", which Google translates as "rockfall", so I'm assuming it was a Tetris clone). Edit: The site does not have a copy of disk 238, however the other disks are present, and each has a folder that is missing on my CD (and for most of them, looking at the title is enough to guess that it's a Tetris clone, hell the one on disk 324 was outright called "Tetris").

So basically, of suppressed or reissued Fish disks, the only ones we really need to find, I think, are 57, 88, and 238. Not much change there, found one disk and discovered another one we'd need to find to have a historically complete Fish disk collection.

I also found an Amiga.org thread that claims there was a Star Trek TNG trivia game on disks 404 and 405 (first release), 506 and 507 (second release), and 538 (bugfix for second release) that was allegedly removed from Fred's CD compilations. I can only speak to FrozenFish Apr94, which contains all of these disks (and the site I linked to for Fish disks also has them), so I don't consider them pulled in the same sense, especially since many of the FF CDs are available online (in fact, the current CD image I'm using is downloaded because of the fact that my original disc is a little scratched). Just listing them here for completeness in case someone else has further information.

Edit: I just checked the DMS of disk 57, and even ran it through DiskSalv looking for deleted files. No dice.

Originally Posted by rygar (Post 1389580)

Please upload it. It's really nice find :D