Thanks to Bill L. for letting me know that my book is now on Slashdot Book Reviews. The reviewer, Mr. Michael Fiegel, does an excellent job covering the book's, well, coverage, and says that he finds it informative and entertaining. While he doesn't give the book a perfect score (again, the subject of the muddy screenshots rears its ugly head), he still recommends the book to anyone who likes fantasy and RPGs. On more personal notes, I recently received my first official fan email from a guy living in Greece, who says he loved the book because it brought back so many memories to him of playing these games as a teenager.

Next Generation has posted an excellent but brief history of copy protection by Adam Swiderski.

Thanks to Dan Chisarick on the SWcollect mailing list for the heads-up on the info for Waxy.org's posting, Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is truly an extraordinary discovery, as the post begins, "From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989." There's even a playable version of "Milliways", the never completed sequel to one of the company's best-selling games, Hitchhiker's Guide. I'm flabbergasted and there's even a great story in the blog post!

My copy of dungeons and desktops came today!

Obviously I havn't read into it much yet but

First quick impressions;

- Nice size / weight hardback
- Pictures all b&w (which we knew)
- Unfortunately all pictures are _very dark_ in printing... :(

more to come later

Gamasutra has posted the latest book excerpt, this time on the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS), as part of their "A History of Gaming Platforms" series.

From the article:

I know that few AA regulars will want to miss this interview with Adam Chowaniec, a PC pioneer who was responsible for creating the Amiga (probably my favorite computer platform of all time).

As luck would have it, I came across an amazing stash of Panasonic JR-200U (aka, Panasonic Personal Computer or PPC) stuff for about $40 shipped that puts my previous collection for this system to shame. In fact, the only major item not present in this new haul was Wordwatch. There will be no need for me to re-hash what was in the prior "A Long Visual Look at..." as you can just read it for yourself if you haven't already. Since all of the setup stuff is already taken care of, I can get right into this haul and PART 1, which will briefly lead into coverage of one of the interesting games now in my possession (subsequent parts will naturally follow suit in various degrees of detail).

First, here's a photo of the new stash, followed by a few cursory findings, then a preliminary look at the first game:

In lieu of doing this as a traditional Photo of the Week - Know your History! feature, I decided that this extremely obscure, but not particularly valuable vintage personal computer deserved a bit more attention.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Chuck "Chuckles" Bueche, a CRPG pioneer who worked closely with Richard Garriott (aka Lord British) on many of the Ultima titles, as well as design his own games 2400 A.D. and Autoduel. Bueche turned out to be an exceptionally articulate fellow, and I think you'll agree that he gave me a fantastic response.