I received a CD in the mail yesterday that has this same version on it pictured here:
I started some discussions about this disc last night over in the duke4 discord, and after seeing this conversation thread here this morning I figured that this would be a good place to share the same information, so provided below is mostly a copy/paste of what I had posted in discord.
So, with the Duke Nukem 3D v1.0 CD that I received today, I've found a handful of small differences between the contents in the duke3d.grp file and a typical v1.0 grp file. After going through the files a bit and playing the game on this CD, it is apparent that the publisher specifically chose not to use the word "Shareware" while describing the disc's contents, and that someone intentionally went out of their way to change some files and nerf the file names of all of the map files except for E1L1.map so that it effectively became a one level demo, much like that one version that had been made for that magazine one time. This is also confirmed by the message that is displayed when the game is exited:
This table shows the files that were found to be different, packed within the grp file:
The .bin file is a binary file so I couldn't tell what the differences were when I compared them with a hex editor, but their contents are somewhat significantly different. The user.con file was intentionally modified to have all levels point specifically to the file E1L1.map as shown in these side by side comparisons:
... and a view of the contents of the grp file reveals that the file names for E1L2.map to E1L6.map have intentionally been borked. You can't export these map files via drag-and-drop, but I was able to successfully export them one by one using Dragon UnPACKer and renaming the files to their original names during the exportation.
I just can't really imagine why they would have intentionally gone to all this effort to harf the files and use labelling that specifically refrains from calling it shareware in the first place? Surely there must have been a reason for this.
The only thing that sounds different at all about this disc and the ones referred to above is that the others were distributed on PC gaming magazine discs, whereas this CD doesn't make any reference to any additional publications - It's just it's own thing (although the software itself sounds like it's the exact same version that was being discussed).
Just some further speculation of my own for the time being...
I'm starting to wonder if there's some possibility that what had transpired might be along the lines of something like:
US Gold was in the middle of transactions for the rights to be the authorized European publisher/distributor but that hadn't been thoroughly completed yet, but it was far enough along that they did have a soft copy of the shareware version in their possession.
As far as distribution goes, if that had not yet been fully authorized yet, could they have maybe brokered a deal with 3D Realms, either formally or informally, where they had been granted the right to distribute a stripped down version in specific regions if they wanted to based on what they did have at the time, and assuming that had been given the green light then US Gold hastily modified the files on their own in order to rush it out the door and get it to market?
That could possibly explain how the same version ended up appearing on the game discs accompanying at least two gaming magazines from France.
I wonder if there's anyone out there that worked for any of the companies involved (3D Realms, US Gold) that could add any insight or details that could help to prove or disprove the legitimacy of this particular version?
All just guesses and conjecture for now anyway.