I was reading through the most recent issue of "Embedded Systems Design" magazine when an old DOS based compiler picutred in an article caught my eye. It reminded me of the first compiler I owned: Power C by Mix Software. What a great piece of software! For about $40 you got a well written book that included documentation, tutorials and sample code. AND you got a compiler with a very good debugger. That compiler serverd me well in college and when experimenting with C on my own.

My thoughts of Power C soon wandered to to good old days of DOS games. Oh yes, how much fun the days of extended memory and configuring interrupts were!

So I jumped on the net and found two of them: 4D Boxing and Lakers vs. Celtics! The polygon graphics of 4D Boxing were so cool and I loved the VCR and camera selection features. Lakers vs. Celtics holds a special place in my heart. Not only because I'm a huge Celtics fan and grew up during the Bird era, but because of a theft. I moved to Memphis for my first "real world" job at AutoZone when my apartment was broken into. Among other things, they took an electric guitar I built from scratch and my brand new TV. What in the world will I do without a TV? So I booted up Lakers vs. Celtics, set the game to be computer vs. computer and sat in front of my monitor watching the "basketball game". Needless to say that grew boring quickly and I soon got a new TV.

You can find many of these "abandonware" games on XTC Abandonware. If you find a classic game that runs to fast on your "modern" computer, you can use DOSBox to make the game run slower and even emulate the sound card from those bygone days.