!Playing old games --- agk's diary 16 October 2026 --- written on GPD MicroPC --- An associate here at sdf emailed me to ask what I'm up to. I sometimes fail to respond, but I adore emails. I've been working more shifts at the hospital than usual. Census drops for the November Thanksgiving holiday and the winter break. So we're short-staff- ed now, and I'm not as likely to be able to pick up as many shifts as I want soon. As a result, no fun hacking days. Instead I'm researching by reading articles and documentation, and playing old games. I want to make a usb-dos distro with adventure games for kids older than 8 and adults. I've had the most fun with two Infocom text-based adventure games: Wishbringer and Plundered Hearts. I've put more time into Wishbringer so far, but just because I play it with my kid. If you've never played an Infocom game, the thing to know is they used the "feelies" (booklets, maps, etc) in the box for realism, plot development, and copy-protection. Don't just install the game in your DOS system; also find a PDF of the stuff that came with it. It's integral to the game. You can read entertaining, if mildly spoiler-y dis- cussions of these games by Gold Machine[^1], The Digital Antiquarian[^2], and 50 Years of Text Games[^3]. Or play them, if they appeal to you. [^1]:golmac.org [^2]:filfre.net [^3]:if50.substack.com I would be curious if, in these days of easy machine language translation, f6k could make a French fork, or p/sldpt make a Russian or Ukrainian fork of the source code. Writers could play with it to make the translation less wooden, with more personality, free of puzzles that depend on American English idiom. One of the failings of the Infocom games was their monolinguality. The pleasure I get from these two Infocom games, and from playing Legend of the Red Dragon with a friend in my town on a BBS via telnet[^3] is the pleasure of coming back to them. [^3]:mutinybbs.com:2332, or penisys.online:6502 (which also provides access to all Infocom games) I didn't grow up gaming, and maybe as a result it feels gross to me to spend hours in a game. It reminds me of morphine and crown royal. These games have a different cadence. With Wishbringer, I play for 15 minutes and die. Then I think for the next few days, "Where could I find gold?" or "How can I get the grue's milk?" before playing for another 15 minutes. The not-at-all cerebral LORD is fun because in 20 minutes I've done all my character can do, or been killed. Usually I send a short message to my friend, then my character gets a room at the inn and goes to sleep. The character can't do any more things for at least 24 hours. In a day or 2 when I telnet back in, the exploits of my friend are in the daily news, and a message is waiting for me. We're on such different schedules that we don't see each other as much as we used to, but a lot is happening in both our lives. We're closer friends since we started playing LORD. A friend and fellow mom in my town got into King's Quest I (the 1990 re-release with VGA graphics and a slightly less sadistic Rumpelstilskin puzzle). I think her pleasure is the same: short play-times that prime her imagination to visit the world and work on the puzzles when she's away from the aged Dell Latitude she plays on. The computerized realms of imagination, puzzle- solving, and asynchronous social gaming were highly developed 35 to 40 years ago. Withered hardware is more than sufficient to return to those realms today. Services that charged by the minute like CompuServe gamified addiction. People hooked on CB Simulator and MegaWars could rack up $2,000/month bills. But BBSs that had only one line rewarded short visits, no more than once a day. That's good for people like me in need of stimulated imagination and online community, who generally prefer life away from the computer.