Christmas break has been a great opportunity to relax a bit, and as part of that, last night I was tinkering around with some stuff on the computer and thought I’d fire up an old copy of DOSBox. DOSBox is a program that allows one to run really old MS-DOS applications on a modern computer. It’s a pretty clever emulator, and it means the ancient classic games I played as a kid can be resurrected.
After a few quick internet searches, I found copies of Lode Runner and Night Mission Pinball. These were two of my favorite games as a kid.
Behold Lode Runner:
Thom and I would spend hours working on beating the levels (there are 150), and then we started making our own. Lode Runner was one of the first games– maybe the first game– to allow you to modify it. We had a great time coming up with clever tricks and traps to make our levels difficult.
Then there was Night Mission Pinball:
I can’t even count the number of hours Dirk and I spent on this game. For whatever reason, it was wicked fun. It had a horrible droning noise in the background though– I guess it was supposed to simulate the hum of a real pinball game. It was bad enough that I eventually de-compiled the assembly code for the game and hacked a few bytes to remove the droning sound. Yeah, geeky.
Anyway, it was a blast to spend a little time playing these classic and reminiscing about those good times… 30+ years ago…