Coverdisc is a small independent site about retro PC gaming: the games themselves, the people who modified them, and the awkward practical business of keeping twenty-five-year-old software running on hardware that did not exist when it shipped.
It started, as these things usually do, with a cupboard. Mine holds a stack of magazine cover discs, a shoebox of burned CD-Rs labelled in fading marker, and at least three copies of the same patch downloaded over three different modems. Most of it still works. A surprising amount of it does not, and the reasons why turn out to be more interesting than the files.
What you will find here
Writing here falls into five rough areas. Game history covers how particular titles were made, sold and received, with an eye on the details that get flattened in retellings. Mod scene looks back at the communities that built total conversions and level packs, and at what happened to their work. Engines and file formats is the technical end: what is actually inside a WAD, a PAK or a BSP, and why it matters when you want to open one today.
Running old games is the practical end, covering compatibility layers, source ports, resolution and audio problems, and the specific ways modern operating systems break old assumptions. Preservation deals with link rot, dead hosts, abandoned archives, and the slow disappearance of things nobody thought worth keeping at the time.
How this site is written
Everything published here is written from first-hand testing where testing is possible, and clearly marked as recollection or secondary reading where it is not. Retro gaming writing has a bad habit of repeating claims until they harden into facts. Where a detail is contested or where I am working from memory, the text says so.
The site does not host game files, cracks or copyrighted material. Where something is legitimately available, the text says where to look. Where it is not, the text says that too.
Who writes it
Marek Dolan. I have been collecting patches, level packs and installer discs since a demo arriving on a magazine cover disc was the fastest way to get one. I am not a professional archivist and this is not an institutional project. It is one person writing carefully about a subject that rewards care.
Corrections are welcome and get acted on. If something here is wrong, the contact page is the place to say so.