Jolt Country

I got into the Atari 8-bit computer late - I bought one from a friend when it could have been considered retro, but not that retro. 1994 or so. I've found a number of Atari sites, the biggest being www.atariage.com.

I am going to go ahead and assume that there is one for the Commodore 64 as well. And certainly, there are a number of Amiga fan sites out there as well.

I got thinking about the IBM PC, its games, and how it apparently didn't inspire any passion in anybody, because I honestly don't know of a forum that is centered around old PC games. I did some checking, and here is what I've learned so far:

Retrograde Station is a website that has "Flopper" images of a lot of the very games I was talking about. PC-exclusive versions of games that, to be honest, looked better elsewhere.

RS had all the games I could think of off the top of my head. Tass Times, the Epyx games - all that stuff is there. From there, I learned about what a "Flopper" image was.

For the PC/PCjr, you would sometimes just stick the floppy drive in the disk drive, and then turn the computer on. The game would then happily load itself. I don't know if they all had their own custom operating systems or if there was sharing going on ("Boosheet," replies Mr. Cho) but the term in the 21st Century for this sort of thing is apparently a BOOTER disk. Or a, ah, Flopper disk.

Flopper is a Bootable Floppy Disk Emulator, and you can get that here: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper

So there we go - this is a good start.

This seems like a decent site



THE
DUG UP
AARDVARK

Abandonia is good as well, and has splintered in some way I don't understand into Abandonia reloaded. There is of course the venerable Home of the Underdogs, which still has an incredible collection despite not being updated in 2 years. You can for instance, sort games by date, starting in 1979 -

http://www.the-underdogs.info/year.php?id=1979

...and continue from there (just change the year at the end of the url to quickly get to the next year). There's a bunch of DOS stuff from the 80's there.

Starflight shrines:

- Starflight (the launcher program at this site inspired the idea for the ACK launcher)
- Another Starflight fan page that's been around forever.

You know I've had a general lament that there seems to be few Apple II game shrines - there's a few individual game shrines like this for Robot Odyssey (that game is great by the way) and some galleries of screenshots and packaging art, and there's the fantastic Asimov archive chockablock with disk images, but it's a big ftp archive, nothing like this for the C64 or this for the Spectrum.

There is a guy who started an online Apple II game manual museum who I was going to help by scanning in docs I had, but he insisted on coding the site himself despite offers from very skilled people (not me) to help with that, and the result is that his site is horrible to navigate and breaks in Firefox, my browser of choice. Shame, because he seems to be sitting on a mountain of Apple II artifacts.