In the interest of sharing, I'd like to provide my current list of working emulator sites for various platforms. All of these enable gameplay directly within your browser, so there's no sticky business of downloading software and finding the necessary game files to get it all going. These are all great sites and we should all show our support. I'm dubbing this the "November 2009" edition of the list and would love to keep adding to it, so suggest away and when I do the next edition, I'll expand it. Here goes:

* 2600online.com - Play various Atari 2600 Video Computer Systems games
* c64s.com - Play various Commodore 64 games
* Freearcade.com (Scott Adams section) - Play various Scott Adams/Adventure International text adventures
* JEMU - Emulate and play on the Acorn BBC Model B, Amstrad CPC464, Dick Smith VZ-300, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, Sinclair ZX80 and Siclair ZX81
* nintendo8.com - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* Play Infocom Adventures Online
* The Gallery of Zork - Infocom museum and plenty of games to play
* Sandy White's Ant Attack
* Sarien.net - Play Sierra adventure games
* SC-3000 Survivors - Play Sega SC-3000/SG-1000 games
* Virtual Apple ][ - Play Apple II and IIGS games
* vNES - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games

Finally, don't forget the Games section right here on Armchair Arcade. Enjoy!

Hardball on the Apple IIgsBill Martens, who runs the superb "Virtual Apple 2 - Online disk archive" has informed me that the site now supports Firefox. Previously the Website only supported Internet Explorer. For those not familiar with the Website, it allows you to play Apple II and IIgs games directly in your browser. No fuss, no muss, and it's fairly configurable to boot. As a bonus, the site also gives you access to the ROM images for use in another emulator or for transfer to your real Apple system. While my preferred way is to of course play these games on the real hardware, nothing beats the immediacy of a well functioning browser-based emulator that already has the ROMs, as it's invaluable for quick reference and screenshot captures. Check it out at http://www.virtualapple.org/.

I just got a newsletter from X-Gaming that contained a startling announcement: The US Copyright Office has legalized abandonware. Or has it? I went to the US Copyright Office website and recognized at once that this claim is a bit exaggerated. Actually, what's happened is that the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA has been relaxed a bit regarding certain types of works. That's the part of the DMCA that makes it illegal to reverse-engineer or to do anything that attempts to bypass the copy protection schemes introduced by software companies. Here's the part about "abandonware":