I concur about DosBox, I’ve had no problems yet. I also concur with Adandonia.com and several of the other sites in their links section. I’ve managed to gather up about 80-some of my original DOS games, mostly adventure games (king’s quest, police quest, space quest series, etc). All play marvelously on DosBox in WinXP. Even games like Duke Nukem 3D work great too. I got sorta whipped up in the fervor of collecting all these games I used to own that I even bought Gabriel Knight on 3.5" Floppy via eBay. Probably could have gotten it from BitTorrent or something but I’m happy with my purchase.
I might have the record for longest shareware-to-purchase gap. I was playing Moraff’s Revenge at a young age, say six or seven (so call it 1989ish.) Dad got the shareware version somewhere, either off one of the local BBSes or CompuServe. I finally bought the full game (as part of a package with other other Moraff roguelikes) early this year. So call it 18 years.
I wonder if I can still pay the programmer for Chopper Commando.
In case such an issue comes up again, all of the Infocom Invisiclues are available on the Net. There are also some walkthroughs avavilable for at least a few of the games.
Everyone should know how to get out of Cleveland.
There’s a Yankees joke in there somewhere.
I saw a whole slew of Sierra games on Gametap. Any suggestions for a place to start? (I never really got into the Sierra adventure games, as I was more of a Lucasfilm/Lucasarts guy.)
I’m a little younger then some of the people here, the first real computer game I really played (not including stupid ones like wheel of fortune, family feud, etc) was the original Space Quest. It came out in 1986, so I was like 5 years old. Took me forever to finish that game, and I think I was a little young to really enjoy it. I was still playing the original nintendo mostly.
However, it was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Graphic Adventure that really made me love computer gaming. I got the original EGA version that came out in 1989, and I played the game before I even saw the movie. I remember getting stuck at the end of the game, when your in the temple, trying to get past the 2nd trial. I was stuck there FOREVER! I remember finally seeing the movie just so I could find out how Indy got past that one… Then I found out you have to click on the door, not the walkway… 
How about PCs that came with a Turbo button, so you could deliberately make your machine run slower so that games wouldn’t go too fast? They were tied to the clock speed, an awesome 8mhz IIRC.
I think we are actually in the (or at least, a) golden age of computer gaming right now. A healthy mainstream market and lots of small niche companies who can distribute cheaply over the net.
Even today my wife and I talk about having an urge.
As for computer games, Space War on the PDP-1, where I learned assembly language programming.
I recall reading an interview with Al Lowe in which he was asked about the death of adventure games. He said that the audience for those games was the type of person who was comfortable at a DOS prompt. Such people tend to be interested in problem solving. Then the first adventure game for most of the crowd that joined after GUIs became standard was Myst, which frustrated a lot of people to the point that they never wanted to play that style of game again.
Heh, speaking of the Zork games, whenever someone hasn’t been seen for a while, I’ll comment “I hope they weren’t eaten by a grue!” 
I’m treated to a wide response of varied puzzled looks in response. :rolleyes:
Oh yes…
Who remembers QEMM? Desqview?
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
Aces Over Europe/Aces Over the Pacific was very fussy about memory settings.
I still have a bunch of floppies in my desk but no drive to put them in at the moment.
I figured out how to hex edit the saved game files for Street Rod and Street Rod II to yield maximum cash. I also edited saved games for the C64 version of Roadwar 2000 to set my vehicles’ fuel consumption to zero.
Ahh, the good old days. I loved getting a new magazine with a brand spanking new game to code in.
I knew a couple of girls that didn’t seem to know that you could save the code to disk. They were typing in the code for the game they wanted to play every time.
Kids. Bah. I remember punching holes out of metal plates and feeding them into my steam powered Logic Mill.
Ah, yes. I did some personal design work for our IT tech guy, and he in turn allowed me access to the company software library. We didn’t have QEMM, but at my request he added it to his requisitions, so I got a copy. The DOS user’s best friend. It made all the difference in the world; I couldn’t believe how much memory it freed up. I don’t think that there was a game I couldn’t play.
My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer, hooked to the TV. There were a few support magazines (“Hot Coco” and “Rainbow”) with code that could be typed in. Standard storage was a tape drive, but it was such a change when an external hard drive came out. I remember playing the Scott Anderson adventures.
For those who miss the old Infocom games, you can play some of them online including what I believe was an unpublished game (The Undiscovered Underground).
Yeah, I vaguely remember QEMM and EMM386
I didn’t mention the Apple games, because they weren’t hard to make run.
I loved the Leather Goddess of Phoebus. It was the first game to include the recently popular scratch and sniff technology. Pizza in the bathroom. Infocom had great packages. You always got special items in game boxes. I also enjoyed Nord And Bert Couldn’t Make Head Or Tale Of It. Do you remember the GEOs operating system for the Apple computer. It was much like Windows 3.1 but Apple dropped the Apple II series when it was just getting going. It took them another year to port it to IBM computers, and gave Windows just enough time to ensure they were the OS of choice. Had GEOs not been delayed you may have been using GEOs today.
One of the magazines for the cassette loaded color computer released a one time special edition with a plastic record to try and provide programs without typing. The records worked for a few people, but mostly didn’t. Dungeons Of Dagareth, and Pyramid were my favorite color computer games for a long time. Klendathu was fun to play too. Land and kill bugs, then go back into space until the next drop.
I don’t think I could have gotten as many programs running without QEMM as I did with it. It’s sad that you need to purchase a separate program to configure boot files to run the other programs.
I still have my C64 on the desk in front of me. Sadly, I haven’t been able to get any of the disks to work for about five years now.
Well, in the early years the Apple II did have a short tape-cassette era — with all the usual frustrations of that medium.
GEOS for the Apple II was released in 1988. Various models of Apple II were still in production up through 1993. The platform was still supported for all that time, if not exactly well promoted toward the end.
In System Shock II, you got SwineKeeper. What better way to occupy yourself while waiting for the annelid-brained zombie to wander off than a quick game on your minesweeper clone?
I once tried typing up a pong-clone in BASIC on the Amstrad CPC 6128 and just as I was about to finish typing the unsaved code my brother pulled the plug on the computer “by accident”. I was ready to throttle him after that. I think I cried, I was only about 9 at the time. 