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WHEN I bought a new computer, my first instinct was to give my old 486 to a charity while it was still worth something. But the rest of the family wanted to keep it, claiming they would still use it. My older son wanted to do his homework, the younger one wanted to play his old CD-ROM games, and my husband announced he would be reading his newspapers online. We kept the 486. Soon enough, everyone discovered that Word spell-checked better in the new machine than in the old one, and that the Web was accessible faster with the new modem. The 486 sat there, lonely and little used. On a January day when school was canceled, with the prospects of the kids coming back inside the house to play, I found an alternative to keep them out of my office and away from my computer. A few years earlier I had purchased a shareware game called Duke Nukem from Apogee. After my son had tried it from a copy I had downloaded from a BBS, I sent in payment to register it. After a while when my son tired of the game and moved onto CD-ROM activities, I removed it from my hard disk. But then last January I reinstalled it on the 486, and the kids played it like it was a brand new game. At the same time I wondered if Apogee, the maker of Duke Nukem, still had available the older EGA/ VGA games. I remembered that we had tried some but had neither registered them nor deleted them from the hard disk. If those games were still available, I could turn the 486 into a gaming machine. I looked up Apogee on the Web and found their site, http://www.apogee1.com. Some old favorites such as Commander Keen, Crystal Caves, and Halloween Harry were still available. The minimum requirement for those DOS games are low compared to today's games. While Apogee has new games available that run on Pentium machines (the latest Duke Nukem on CD-ROM, for instance), they also offer the older EGA and VGA games. There is a picture on the Apogee page for each game available. My kids chose two of them: the sequel to Duke Nukem and (the name sounds more terrible than the game really is) Alien Carnage (formerly Halloween Harry). We printed out the order form from the site and sent it in with our payment. All of Apogee's products can be purchased directly online. To install the new games I had to fidget a bit since one required more free memory than was available. I used memmaker to send some applications to upper memory. The new games have surprisingly good graphics and make use of the Sound Blaster to produce nice background music. Although these games cannot be called "educational," kids really enjoy playing them just for fun. According to my kids, the Apogee games are as good as the Nintendo games that some of their friends own. Since the games we ordered are DOS-based, I had to teach the children how to navigate between them using the commands CD\ and CD .. (Change Directory). In this Windows world, DOS has been relegated to a mere program, seldom used nowadays. If my kids do not learn anything else playing the Apogee games, they at least earned a few DOS commands. |
| Marlene Gaberel is DACS' new assistant Webmaster and a regular contributor to the newsletter. Contact Marlene via e-mail at mgaberel@ct1.nai.net. |
