I managed to find a CD image on the Internet Archive of 166 issues, plus one demo, of Softdisk! Additionally I found a bunch of issues of Softdisk's IBM PC product Big Blue Disk, on myabandonware! Both places, it's reputed, are former projects of the id Software guys.
The rights to the Softdisk magazine are largely unknown. They used to be sold by a company called Syndicom, but its owner, Tony Diaz, passed away in 2021. I don't know if anything has changed hands since then, and I'm unsure how to find out.
The issues of Big Blue Disk are piecemeal, having been sold in chunks, I gather to different people. The fact that a Commander Keen game and a couple of works based on what would become the Wolfenstein 3D image were part of it provided quite some incentive to sell that portion of it.
I have it within my power to make a package for those as I have with Loadstar, but because the rights are so uncertain, I think I'd have to go about it differently. My idea is to release each of them as two major parts, one the menu and assorted files needed to run it, the other the disks themselves. The menus would be sold for maybe $5 each, the disks given away freely. I mean, after all, I found them on abandonware sites. I'd present them only so they'd be in one canonical piece, instead of buried in an ISO using a Classic Mac filesystem or as loose PC files. This way, if someone arises with a legitimate claim to the files and the desire to sell them themselves, despite the fact that they're all over 30 years old by now (copyright terms are crazy), I haven't sold them or profited off of them directly, I just have this add-on that can be used if one does have the files.
Best though would be to make a deal with the current rights holder(s). I don't know how to go about finding them though.
The rights to the Softdisk magazine are largely unknown. They used to be sold by a company called Syndicom, but its owner, Tony Diaz, passed away in 2021. I don't know if anything has changed hands since then, and I'm unsure how to find out.
The issues of Big Blue Disk are piecemeal, having been sold in chunks, I gather to different people. The fact that a Commander Keen game and a couple of works based on what would become the Wolfenstein 3D image were part of it provided quite some incentive to sell that portion of it.
I have it within my power to make a package for those as I have with Loadstar, but because the rights are so uncertain, I think I'd have to go about it differently. My idea is to release each of them as two major parts, one the menu and assorted files needed to run it, the other the disks themselves. The menus would be sold for maybe $5 each, the disks given away freely. I mean, after all, I found them on abandonware sites. I'd present them only so they'd be in one canonical piece, instead of buried in an ISO using a Classic Mac filesystem or as loose PC files. This way, if someone arises with a legitimate claim to the files and the desire to sell them themselves, despite the fact that they're all over 30 years old by now (copyright terms are crazy), I haven't sold them or profited off of them directly, I just have this add-on that can be used if one does have the files.
Best though would be to make a deal with the current rights holder(s). I don't know how to go about finding them though.