http://kultcds.com/Games/index.php?page=game&game=126
First I searched in the catalog for things like this:
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... dn=&descr=
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... dn=&descr=
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... dn=&descr=
and the corresponding duplicate searches and some similar ones.
Then I compiled a full list of all the demos in the catalog and finally listed them by date. I also listed the sources for all variants, aswell as date, name and size of the characteristic file for each version:
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/2014-09/1411839115.or.94648.jpg
The next step would be gathering all the exe variants, unpack them and throw their cabs into the catalog to see if they correspond to any cab versions. I can't think of followup steps that are worth mentioning now. If I come across some special tricks, I will post them tomorrow or late this night.
EDIT:
Finally compared the demos. There are 5 versions in the catalog:
1997-05-30 Catalog Score: 2
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... ir=&o=&dn=
1997-12-17 Catalog Score: 1
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... ir=&o=&dn=
1998-01-28 (old assets) Catalog Score: 1
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... ir=&o=&dn=
1998-01-28 (new assets) Catalog Score: 7
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 37566&o=da
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 97984&o=da
1999-01-14 Catalog Score: 10
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 41441&o=da
http://www.kultcds.com/Catalog/index.ph ... 59347&o=da
Uploads coming later.
Many websites say that the sneak peek was released in late 1997, while actually there was already one in mid 1997 as you can see from the list above. (Relevant) Files from that version reach back to March 1997. It's not clear whether the cited late 1997 release is in fact the early 1998 release people just messed up their dates (for plausibility, see catalog scores above).
Going more into the scores: To make the values easier to compare, I figured we should instead of counting each occurance as one point, divide each occurance by the number of CDs in its canonical month.
Thereby we first get this list of occurances (skipping those that don't have a canonical date assigned to them, yet), followed by the number of Magazines with CDs in that month (a magazine won't put a demo on both CDs of one month, so counting them twice would distort results):
1997-05-30
2x 09/97 (15)
1997-12-17
1x 06/98 (19)
1998-01-28 (old assets)
1x 05/98 (15)
1998-01-28 (new assets)
1x 03/99 (14)
1x 05/98 (15)
3x 07/98 (12)
2x 06/98 (19)
1999-01-14
8x 04/99 (21)
1x 05/99 (13)
This gives us this final score table (showing that the 1999 demo might be slightly less common than the latest sneak peek, contrary to the simple scoring method):
Code: Select all
1997-05-30 0.13
1997-12-17 0.053
1998-01-28 (old assets) 0.067
1998-01-28 (new assets) 0.49
1999-01-14 0.46