1987 is about the time I stopped playing with computer games. I held on to my c128 as my primary computer up until 1998. In fact, one of the reasons that I bought my first PC ten years ago was the fact that I had just found out that it would run a c64 emulator.

As a result, I missed out on many of the old DOS games, excepting the ones that I got a chance to play at a friends' houses. In a way that's been good for me, as I can now go back through and play ten years of games that I had missed using dosbox. I have been working on a frontend program to help keep track of the games:

http://dosbox-pykde.berlios.de/

The application is in bad need of being updated, as it's set to work with an older version of dosbox, and they seem to change their configuration in drastic ways from release to release. I may spend some time getting it workable with a newer release of dosbox here shortly, as I feel a slight urge after reading these comments to try out some of the DOS games that I have missed out on.

BTW, I always wanted an Amiga, but could never afford one. I would've liked to see what it was like to use one of those.

I remember that game, the sequel to miner 2049'er. I only played the first one.

There was a pretty nifty game for the c64 called Wizard, which was a puzzlish platform game. It was one of the first ones that I'm aware of that allowed you to create your own levels. The features of that game, spells obstacles and layout of the platforms, was something I thought to be very revolutionary at the time.

Ha ha!! There were so many of those, it's impossible to list them all.

The best, and most popular were the Infocom games, where failure to light a torch, lantern, match, etc. would put you in danger of being eaten by a grue (a theme that spanned the whole lineup, regardless of genre).

You can find the Infocom games here:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3398113/Infocom_Universe_Bootleg

Pirated, but it's very hard to get the actual copies of the games these days, and the items that came packaged with the game were essential in completing those games (and also very enjoyable to read).

While the link above may not sit well with you, since it's to a torrent site, the original Zork trilogy has been released as freeware, and you can find them here:

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/

Text based interactive fiction was very popular on the old 8bit computers (one reason was that it was easier to port to the multiple different home computers around at that time) and there are too many different ones to be able to identify the game you played. The Infocom games are possibly the cream of the crop in this area.

Also, interactive fiction is still alive and you can get all sorts of great games here:

http://ifarchive.org/

Some of these are better than other ones, so be sure to read the ratings and reviews. A few of them match or exceed the quality present in the old Infocom games.

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/194/Darklands.html

I've never played this one.

I think that the Life game involves a deist philosophy, whereas something like Populous depends on divine intervention.

Not only that, but they seem to have missed the boat on the older computer games as well. I can think of quite a few that should probably be on the list.

Questron - An interesting mixture of interface styles, embedded mini games, and probably the best finale in any game for years to come.

Karateka - A very interesting game with great music and graphics. Between this and the arcade game Kung Fu, we get the Street Fighter games, etc.

Project Space Station - A very good strategy/simulation/management game which had an easy to learn and use interface. Many strategy games of this era were unattractive due to the interface, but this program seems to have set the bar here.

Leaderboard Golf - A lot of my friends were really addicted to this game. It had 3d graphics and a decent physics engine. All of the extra courses and sequels to this game is a testament to it's innovativeness and popularity.

Hacker - A game before it's time. An exciting game where you break into a remote computer and send a robot on an involved spy mission. I'm not really sure how popular this game was, but I thought it was something that hadn't been tried before done well.

Wild Wild West (I'm not too sure about the name) - I think this is one of the first games with dialog and characters, which idea made it's way into future adventure games like Monkey Island. Depending on how you interact with the "npc", you would either satisfy it, scare it, or be drawn into a gunfight.

Elite! - I'm not going to bother to describe this, as I know most of y'all know what this is, and are probably wondering why it's not listed.

Little Computer People - It's possible that there would be no Sims games today if this nice program was never made.

Superbowl Sunday - I think that this was one of the games that influenced the sports team management games that have been seen since. (A lot of the Avalon Hill games and some of the SSI games suffered from difficult interfaces, which is something that I noted about with PSS.)

This is just a few from the top of my head, and I'm only thinking about c64 now, there are quite a few others games on other platforms that dramatically influenced future games.

It looks like his main site is here:

http://rdcpro.com/

I remember that my cousin used to say that linux was finicky when it came to hardware. The problem was that the hard drive had a bunch of bad sectors, which showed up on the console, and in syslog. Since Windows never reported any problems, the problem turned from a bad hard drive, to a "finicky OS" in my cousin's mind.

It wasn't until months later when random problems would keep appearing, even after
fresh reinstalls, that the hardware was suspected as being the problem.

Well, at least it wasn't a speeding redneck in a 'cuda. ;)

Thanks for point that out. :)

I'm still listening to that darned episode, but they've only been babbling about ssl certificates and other items in their listeners mailbag.

My point was that the os in bios was an essential component, as the tpm is also. I never tried to say that tpm == trusted computing, rather that it is just a component of it. Hardware virtualization is also an essential component (it's also dual use, and I run virtual machines very frequently). A builtin hypervisor (or rootkit, depending on who's controlling it) is able to restrict access to the tpm, allowing only "trusted entities" to configure it. If you own the machine, but don't have full access and control of the hypervisor, this is bad. If you don't own the machine, and don't have that access and control, this is good.

The Paranoid Conspiracist in me says: "This is an essential step for the trusted computing platform, where a government or corporate owned rootkit could exist on your computer, with little to no ability to be replaced or removed by the owner of the machine."

There was an april fools joke around here a couple of years ago.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/01/1448207

Perhaps it's time that this approach should be realized, instead of just joked about. This would allow people to to use the mysql api for their applications that require it, while providing a path to start using postgresql in the future.

I always remember the knocking sounds of a 1541 when I look at computer games on a shelf in a store. :)

That's what scares me. Not so much the blocking, but a transparent routing of outgoing port 53 traffic to the ISP's dns server.

Just two days ago, I saw where my ISP's dns wasn't able to resolve a few domains. I switched back to the root servers and haven't had a problem.

Well, maybe the IIc. I remember watching teachers walking around looking smug while carrying those. ;)