Collected a huge pile of old CD-Rs and retail pirate discs to take to the trash bin, since I finally bought the stuff. Decided to re-check the contents of a useless stack I assembled years ago. Among the usual crap I notice a marker label "Combat Mission Barbarossa to Berlin & Afrika Korps" with a note "Online activation!" below.
That got me curious, since activation is not a common feature of torrent editions. Pop the disc in. Both games are there, with a txt, with the order number and eLicense serials. Fired both up, installation went smoothly, activation succeeded, but the receipt told me I've already activated both titles once (didn't revoke them), and that counted as my "second copy".
So, I bought them 5 years ago, forgot about it (I don't even remember having a card 5 years ago) and nearly threw them away, even though both were on my wishlist at GG for a year (that's 50$ dammit).
Won't make that mistake again, will stuff them in the middle of a 1TB HDD, complete with NoCDs of old, because I don't care much for online-activating stuff.

Now to find if there are any mods for the series...

So....moral of the story; check your junk pile for gems?

Or organize your junk better, especially when you hit several hundred in game count.

I have tons of old CDs/etc used for backups or random file swaps made before thumb drives came about. I wonder what stuff i've saved away all these years. Someday I simply must go through it all.

Making me feel bad, wishing I had kept my 'junk pile' of old games. "Bah, I don't play this any more, so I'll just chuck it." If I'd only known...

I'm sure that's a story most of us can relate to.

My solution is to never throw anything away.

It's not necessarily a good solution considering the current state of our flat, but it does prevent valuable things from being thrown away accidentally. ;)

Thought this was about dumpster diving.

Anyway, some stories:

Around 98 or 99 i found a CD-R in it's little plastic case just chilling in the street, quess somebody dropped it or something, took it home and it turned out to be full of Capcom arcade roms and an emulator called Callus. that thing blew my mind, up to that point i didn't know anything about the emulation scene, let alone that you could play arcade games on your computer. I lost track of how many copies i made for friends.

I went to college near a place that rented office space for IT start-up companies, every weekend i would go around the back and look into the trash containers, i got towers, ram, hard drives, monitors, all kinds of shit that companies were constantly throwing away. My girlfriend and i put 6 systems together just from spares that i had found in the trash, we set them up in a long table in our dorm and had some crazy Quake lan-parties with a bunch of friends.

One of the Commodore 64s that i have in the attic i found by the side of the road, complete with monitor and one of those shitty C2N drives and a metric fuckload of tapes. All of this was inside a sewing machine box and what caught my eye was the keyboard sitting pretty right on top. The thing was still in working condition last time i checked.

If we're talking about dumpster diving, I've only got one story.

In 2001/02... Found a whole working IBM machine, P2-era. Sitting on top of someone's trash one morning. Decided to be late to school to pick it up and stick it in my room.

Still worked perfectly; had 128MB of RAM at the time. Missing the hard drive (they at least knew enough ;) ), but otherwise fully functional. Couldn't find a use for it at the time, so I just junked it, as would have happened had I left it alone, anyway.

While I was at uni it got to the point where the comp techs would just walk into one of the classes they knew we were in and quietly tell us what they were about to dump so we could just go pick it up off their hands.

PS2 dev kits, Xbox dev kits, whole PC's you name it we got it...

I tossed away a whole bunch of old backup DVD-Rs I'd been amassing when I was moving once; sure enough among the cake boxes I tossed was my backup copy of the the original Freeverse release of HoMM V for the Mac (which is apparently now completely unavailable since Freeverse's license to distribute Ubisoft products has lapsed). Imagine my relief when I found a second backup copy lurking in an album of old game backups I'd burned.