Total DOS Collection (TDC) release #23 - August 2025

Our best release ever!

Another birthday celebration for the machine that started it all, the IBM PC.

We hit a couple milestones this year; the first is that the archive is now a solid Tebibyte
in size.  Considering the entire first decade of PC gaming fits inside a couple Gibibytes,
having the archive now consume over 1024 of them is simply humbling.

The other milestone is that our database is reporting that we have more than 18,000 unique
games in the archive.* Back in early 2007 when this project was started, we'd kicked around 
the idea that there are probably 20,000 DOS games out there- a number that was a total guess
at the time, but is revealing itself to be fairly accurate.

-side story-
Back in ~1984 or so, I remember going into software stores to look for games for our family's 
IBM PCjr. The store shelves were sagging under the weight of all the C64, Atari, Apple, etc 
games, but the IBM section was barely a few titles wide. I remember sadly thinking that my 
stupid IBM machine was never going to be gaming powerhouse that I wanted. Ha! We showed 'em. 
My impatient self just had to wait another 30-40 years and now there's more material than can 
be played in a lifetime. :)



* Yes, unique here is sometimes difficult to determine and we can probably split hairs all day 
that there are truly 18k unique things in the archive, but when we consider that there are 58(!)
items/variants of DOOM, and those are all counted as a single entry, having anywhere near 18k
total entries being tracked is really a massive number.  Oh yeah, there's a few applications,
utilities, and drivers also in the collection, but no one is really focused on or counting those,
and so they are not part of our 18k count.



---


Since 2007, the TDC group has worked to document, sort, rename, catalog, and
scrub everything that is DOS.  Similar to other renaming groups, the
collective work is presented in a CRC based .dat file which can be loaded into
"ROM" scanning tools (we use RomVault, DATScan or DOSCenter) to assist in identification
of DOS files.
The .dat file is built off our archive of material and is updated several
times per week.  The latest .dat file is always available on our website.  

Every year, as a toast to the IBM PC's birth, a snapshot of the archive is released
to the world to celebrate the occasion.
Each snapshot supersedes the previous one, as new files are added, typos fixed, 
and the occasional file pruned.