Sierra's AGI and SCI and Lucasfilm/LucasArts' SCUMM were strokes of genius and have been a major factor in these companies' success. It allowed them to not just churn out games at a far greater pace than if every game's tech had to be built from the ground up, but also made porting to other platforms much easier. In that sense they are the predecessors of Unity and Godot and all the other game engines we have today.

Had a Siena, 3c, 5, 5mx and a netBook. Loved every one of them. Great little machines.

Quick nitpick for the title and tags: it's the 5MX not the 5X (there was no such machine)

Such a tragedy. Sierra games were responsible for my love of adventure games and if it wasn't for them, I never would have made the games I have.

This is really interesting stuff. I really appreciate that the author goes into a lot of detail, including all the failed attempts, and doesn't just post the final results. Will have to subscribe to get further updates.

The digital world is divided in things that run DOOM, and things that soon will run DOOM.

I've never had a ZX Spectrum, or even seen one in real life, but it's been a source of endless fascination for me. Lost a lot of money on RCL's Vega+ scam.

Loved this game, even if I absolutely suck at it. Fraggle, who created the page, has done a port of the game to SDL (easily found through the link on the bottom) and is generally a cool person. An interview with the original creator of Sopwith is coming up.

It makes me really sad that Nintendo is shutting down these services. Though obviously a company can't be expected to keep things running indefinitely, the fact that things can just plain disappear when a company tires of it (i.e. it's no longer profitable) is one of the major reasons I am not a big fan of many online platforms.

As much as I'm for being gender-neutral, what they did here really annoys me. They've changed every instance of "he", "him" or "this" to "they", "them" or "their", which is fine. But leaving the old text in grey strike-through and the new text in italic makes it very jarring to read when you're just trying to get the actual information. I ended up resorting to custom CSS for making it read normally.

I used to use Turbo BASIC, but QuickBASIC was a major step up from that. QB4.5 made BASIC feel professional. Microsoft was very clever to replace GWBASIC with QBASIC. I wonder how many people graduated to QuickBASIC from it.