Public Commander Keen Forum

Hi Everyone!

I'm curious to know what they have in their collections regarding physical Commander Keen merchandise to include mail order floppy discs, game boxes, or any advertisements.

I'll share my humble collection in this thread really soon

(I don't know why a reduced res version displays. Here's a link to proper image
https://i.imgur.com/pAhX3ik_d.webp?maxw ... ity=medium). I'm on my phone and 21st century brainwashing means I can't even look at the url of an image within a page

I have this CD.

I should also have a 5 1/4 inch What Magazine diskette with Keen1 on it. But for reasons unknown to me, I don't.

Benvolio wrote: ↑Mon Mar 01, 2021 8:05

(I don't know why a reduced res version displays. Here's a link to proper image
https://i.imgur.com/pAhX3ik_d.webp?maxw ... ity=medium). I'm on my phone and 21st century brainwashing means I can't even look at the url of an image within a page

I have this CD.

I should also have a 5 1/4 inch What Magazine diskette with Keen1 on it. But for reasons unknown to me, I don't.

Very nice. I always love seeing the 3D Realms Commander Keen Cd. Hopefully I'll own a copy of this in the future.

what is a CD?

Ah yes, a CD. An ancient technology that many speak of only in hushed tones. I've merely heard tales of it, myself.

I think I got my last CD approx. 15 years ago

Here's what I got



I also have the Keen 6 manual somewhere, but its destroyed because I coloured it as a kid...

I'd still love to see your manual if you can find it, even if coloured/scribbled on. Perhaps if nobody's already done it, you could make a youtube video about it.

(No I'm not just trying to access those copy protection codes )

here's a digital copy of my ​3 1⁄2-inch floppies:

I still have my Keen 6 floppies, which I've had since the mid 90'ies. They both look very similar to the one of 55Aavenue: Blue 3.5" disks labeled "Aliens Ate My Babysitter" in a typewriter-like font underneath a Commander Keen logo. The main difference is I have TWO disks, labeled Disk 1 and Disk 2 in the upper right corner. They came in the big box, which have sadly been lost sometime during the past decades.
Anyone knows what's the difference between Keen 6 distributed on one or two disks?
This weekend I'll start up my "Keen Machine", which has a working 3.5" drive - and a CRT monitor! - then I can check what is on the disks, because I don't remember

From the disk images floating around, it looks like they split up the CGA and EGA versions across multiple disks. It looks like there's a 5.25" 360 kB version across three disks and a 3.5" 720 kB version across two. They have filenames like CK6-1C.EXE, CK6-2V.EXE and CK6-4.EXE on them.

If yours are any different, please make a binary disk image of them if you can, because that will preserve every byte on the disk, including what's in the free space. It was looking in this free space on a disk image where a previously unknown beta version of Keen 1 was found, as it had been deleted at some point but the data remained behind in the free space. So looking in all the free disk space on all the Keen disks is worth a check, and indeed any other commercially produced floppies from the era. You never know what you might find!

I just checked the disks and Disk 1 contains
INSTALL.EXE from 06-11-1991 03:26
and the hidden files CK6-1V, CK6-2C, CK6-2V, CK6-3, all from 15-11-1991.
On Disk 2 there are two hidden files: CK6-1C and CK6-4, both also from 15-11-1991.

If this seems in any way out of the ordinary, I would be happy to make disk images for a thorough investigation

8bit-herpetology wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 12:56[...]

This was not necessarily about hidden files, but deleted ones. When you delete a file in DOS, it actually just erases the first character of the file name, making the file entry and the associated disk space appear empty and allowing DOS to reuse any of it as needed. But until that space is reused and thus overwritten with other data, the original data is still there and some programs like UNDEL can attempt to undelete previously deleted files. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is how the beta version of Keen 1 was restored from the Gamer's Edge sampler disk. The deleted files must have been stored on the original master disk and that master disk must have been cloned (a full 1:1 copy of the disk, not just copying the existing files onto a blank disk) for those deleted files to end up on a disk (image) that ended up in the hands of a customer.

That's why simply searching for hidden files is not enough if you have any original floppies. You would have to look at the data in the "unused" parts of the floppy. That's why creating an image of the floppy would be extremely helpful. Because even if you don't have the knowledge and tools to examine the hidden data, the image would allow other people to do so without requiring access to the actual floppy disk.

So if you can, please create disk images of your floppies. If one of your original floppies ever goes bad, you'll be glad to have such a disk image.

You can see my floppy disks of CDV Software (Keen's German distributor then) on the Commander Keen Fan Site Celle, bought second-hand in the mid-2000s. An example:

Gee, I wanna access their BTX! It's the hippest thing in town!

Hopefully the CKFSC will be given new life one day...

Very cool item. The fact it contains one of the non shareware episodes automatically increases fascination