Also, Planescape: Torment is IMHO the game with the best writing ever, from the same guy as the KOTOR games and Neverwinter Nights and Pathfinder and Divinity (Chris Avellone)
Excellent - thanks!
I prefer retrogaming to modern gaming, for the most part. Especially RPGs, I like in the 8- and 16-bit console era. The whole Mother series (Mother, Earthbound, Mother 3 – which I’m now playing through), Chrono Trigger, Dragon Warrior (particularly IV), Ultima IV, Secret of Mana, the early Final Fantasies, etc. I just enjoy the simplicity of the top-down view, colorful 8/16-bit graphics, and more straightforward combat systems. For whatever reason, I like the way these games play. Maybe it’s because I cut my teeth on the original Dragon Warrior (which, today, I’m not sure I’d enjoy as much, with a fairly shallow story, and so much focus on grinding. The NES port of Ultima IV, which was the next JRPG I played, was so much deeper, even though there still was a good bit of grinding involved).
The Atari 2600 games are a little too primitive for me to enjoy except to marvel at the programming wizardry the developers employed to get those games working on that machine. My favorite game on that system was Warlords. We’d play that 4-players at family gatherings all the time, and it was a hoot. That was a Breakout-style game that I didn’t find boring.
While I grew up with a VIC-20 and C128, I don’t really find myself returning much to VIC-20 or C64 games. My interest starts with the NES and more recent consoles.
That’s another game I obsessed over as a kid (on our Apple II+) that felt clunky when I tried to replay it as an adult. Buying spell components? Random encounters? Feh.
Apparently he worked on an updated version of the game himself and posted about it on the AtariAge forums.
No comments about Pong? Pong was the first video game I played. I can’t imagine that the experience is different now.
I can’t tell you how many years of my life I sank into exploiting one bug in the PC version of Rogue (the predecessor to Nethack, and the game that lent its name to the genre of Roguelike games).
I’d need a DOS emulator to play it again today, though.
These days you can play it in a browser: Rogue | Play game online!
Ah, but I doubt that particular version of Rogue duplicates the bug I exploited in PC Rogue 1.1 !
In PC Rogue 1.1, due to your initial inventory not having all its interal fields zeroed out, you can wield the food ration you start the game off with, and it acts like a +4096 to-hit, +4096 to damage weapon. Every swing hits unerringly, and instantly kills even the toughest opponent!
I recall a diner with food like that.
That was my first game system, and I remember that its images were burned into our furniture style televisions. We weren’t allowed to play games on the living room tv for years after because of this,
We had a Pong-style home game too. It was Sears branded, and named Hockey-Jokari. It had four – count ‘em, FOUR! – different pong variants you could play. The Jokari variant was basically what all the other sets called “handball”. The oddest thing about it was that it use the blacker-than-black signal of the TV set to draw Player 2’s paddles, meaning you pretty much need an analog NTSC TV set to play it anymore.
My dad warned us about the danger of the image getting burned into the screen, and only let us play for a few minutes at a stretch (and with the contrast turned down). Heaven forbid we should damage the display of that 9-inch $50 vacuum tube black-and-white Craig TV set!
Emulators are completely legal as long as you have a legitimately licensed copy of the ROM (Kickstart ROM in the case of an Amiga) and a legitimately licensed copy of the game (which, presumably, cones with its own legitimate copy of the Amiga OS on floppy to boot from).
Usually that’s provided by having a real Amiga to copy the ROM out of and a real copy of the game media to copy into an emulation disk file.
If you had both of those, of course, you wouldn’t necessarily need the emulator. 
I believe this part will depend on your jurisdiction and the specific game platform in question.
If it’s a straight byte-for-byte copy it might be OK. Maybe. But if the platform has any sort of DRM or basic copy protection on it, the very act of ripping it may be a DMCA violation in the US, even if it’s only for your own at-home use. Our copyright laws suck.
And depending on the publisher, sometimes you don’t even own a game even if you have the physical media; you’re just granted a license to play it.
I don’t think there are any legal ways to rip or distribute ROMs of those types, at least not in the US. So we can’t really discuss them past that.