PC-Man and the spark of childhood wonder

The author mentions his father's "$2000 computer", a figure has no impact in 2025, when $2,000 doesn't seem like a particularly large amount of money to have spent on a state of the art PC.

I'm of the opinion that writers should make it a habit in pieces like these to always include prices that have been adjusted for inflation. In this case, $2,000 corresponds to $6,731.61, which provides better context for the story.

I wrote a “multimedia engine” in those days, also a booter which used no MS-DOS calls, BIOS and assembly only, to render vector graphics on both CGA and EGA-based systems .. the engine was used to produce 3 educational titles before the publisher went under.

Definitely fun days, working out how to be a bit faster than the BIOS and not use a single bit of DOS.

The discussion about the nature of auteur-ship is interesting. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a highly-skilled technician, craftsman or engineer. Some people are able to do things that are genuinely awesome (in the orignal sense) without necessarily showing the intellectual aspects associated with auteurs. They are not less worthy of praise and admiration than good auteurs.

PC-Man and Paratrooper were the very first PC games I ever played.

Obligatory, and perennial, complaint: Most of the images look terrible; they are squashed to a 16:10 aspect ratio, when they should all be 4:3.

I hate squashed screenshots. Does everyone forget that screens used to be 4:3? Does nobody notice the squashed oval shapes of planets (and other circles)?

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