Gamez R kewl...

I spent most of this evening trying out stacks of old Windows (and DOS) CD-ROM games to see if they'd work. Most of them didn't. No big deal really, I'm not a huge PC gamer anyway. The two I was thrilled to see working were Combat (a 3D update of the Atari 2600 classic) and Dig Dug Deeper (the title says it all). I had never played these games before, since I purchased them when I had the money to buy PC games but no PC powerful enough to run them. Dig Dug Deeper is especially cool, and one feature I love is being able to "surface" and chase after that last creature who runs away after you kill all the others. Ah, sweet victory! ;)

I don't entirely blame Windows itself for the games not running, I mean these are some VERY old games, and PC hardware has changed a lot in the past decade or so. Still, it demonstrates the achilles heel of Windows machines, and the advantage of game consoles. Newer more advanced consoles come out every couple years it seems, but even the older obsolete ones will always be able to play the games that were designed for them. I guess you could say the same for PCs if you didn't update the operating system or change the hardware, and that's where the Protovision project comes in. The idea is to build a machine that won't change, so the games it plays now will still play many years in the future.

I guess this is the best time for me to be doing this project, since those 10- to 12-year-old games that still work under XP came out when retrogaming was at its peak. I doubt we'll ever see as many retro compilations and 3D updates of classic games as were released in the late '90s. If I would have gone with Vista, even more of the older games might have refused to run, so now's a good time to just build a machine and leave it as-is. I'd imagine the emulators (which are the real backbone of this project) would be virtually immune to the problems of off-the-shelf CD-ROMs, although I'm anticipating some minor difficulties with MAME and possibly others, but hopefully nothing that can't be worked out.

Despite the surprisingly small number of successes, I'm really glad I took the time to pull out all those old games. It helped me clear out some clutter, and if nothing else I got a break from designing logo screens to do what this machine was intended for... playing games.