Back when I was but a wee lad, I was lucky enough that my family got an Apple IIgs for our home (this is back when you practiced typing at school on an Apple IIe and thought it was so incredible, loading everything on the disk drives). There were some simple games that came for the Apple IIgs (Marble Madness, Crystal Quest, and even that demo-car-game-thing that came with the IIgs, which I was really disappointed when the disk died).

One day my mom brought home the “laptop” of the day (a monster 30lb Compaq, complete with its own CRT display and built-in full sized keyboard for the lid… I think we still have it in a closet somewhere, though I don’t think it works anymore). The first game I played on that thing (being an IBM PC with DOS onboard) was the original Quest for Glory : So you want to be a hero?

Nothing has quite replaced that. Sierra had a good thing going with all their adventure series (Quest for Glory, King’s Quest, Space Quest…) All were hours and hours of fun, and really infinitely replayable because of how many different ways you could play it (I still haven’t gone through the QfG series as a theif).

I tried this weekend to install DosBox, which seems like the most complete DOS emulator I’ve come across (I’ve never been able to get VDMsound to work). I actually got the VGA remaster of QfG1 to run! But since I’m running this on my old (read 500MHz Pentium III), QfG4 runs really slowly, but I’m confidant that if I ran this on a new computer, I could experience all these games in their old school glory!

I’m glad the Open Source community is there to fill in where hardware moved away from. If it weren’t for these DOS and Arcade (NES, SNES, Sega, etc) emulators, many of these games that we grew up with would be lost. I really want my kids to experience these games (knock it off, I’m serious!). Though they may laugh at the old school graphics compared to the 3D relms created now (and for the foreseeable future) I loved those hand done backgrounds (remants of the old hand animation done by Disney before they sucked).

I can’t wait to experience these games again (though I may have to wait for a new computer it looks like).