Impressive and Amazing PD Software! Any thoughts?

[hamster]

Hi Everyone,

In my oldie days when I had an Amiga 500 (from 90-93) I used main stream games and utilities.

Now I used to buy Amiga Format and I did notice the PD Section.... of course back in 1990, there was no way I could connect to the net to download Public Domain software and I never got around to ordering them. This evening I tried a few and I am amazed at good a lot of these were (and still are!) put together.

For example, the LSD Docs collection... an amazing horde of documentation (the feel from these can't be replicated on the PC platform - that retro feel I guess). I got them all and they really help with the retro-gaming because I have forgotten a lot of finer points of some games and utilities. They are also very cleanly done and don't have any hard to read demoscene text that tend be in some. Great stuff in there... a lot have the original documentation for games/utils in them - I have long forgotten the Last Ninja or Space Rogue background story for example... and even then that was on C64.

Likewise the catalogue of 17 Bit's collection is extremely well done. Functional and informative, I could zoom in the right .adf (out of 4000+... gotta say wow!). I never knew it was sooo big.

Another group I just checked out is Absolute Adventurer - which again is "texted" cleanly and has a nice starry background. The content was focused towards adventure solutions and reviews etc.

Anyone know of similar groups or PD disks that are similar to the above? What groups did you like? What was the best part of PD scene? What PD software should I definitely not miss? I remember vaguely seeing a Vistapro slideshow years ago with a soundtrack - my only encounter with PD software then - sniff!

I have heard that grapevine is recommended - tried 2 disks - although I found the background color cycling made reading the big text hard! Anyone with a fave top five list groups like lsd or similar - or good groups?

.... must finally get a round to Eric Swart's great artistic demos - I remember seeing screenshots of Gulf Conflict in Amiga Format years ago....

Any veterans from the PD scene around that might get me interested in right part of this vast archive? My starting point is backtoroot's ftpsite.

I haved lurked here from time to time but I have watch Cody's dedicated efforts in the "top" <you name it!> list from time to time with keen interest.

Hamster.