A Lightweight Discovery

Wanting to post about something more lightweight, my thoughts turned to having run across how it’s possible to “play in your browser” a recent port of the original Pac-Man to the Tandy Color Computer 3. I could mention the only somewhat earlier port of Donkey Kong to that home computer (following up on the rather well-done period knockoff “Donkey King” for its four-colour predecessors) that had attracted just a little attention and the whole matter of “not having had games in the same quantity as for most other home computers, doing something like this now stands out,” but all in all it does seem lightweight.

Even so, though, I did find myself thinking all of a sudden of the way personal computing was presented in the 1980s, of judgments of that decade as a whole both later and period, and of the risk of making broad assumptions about who didn’t have the chance to “have things the nostalgic way I did,” to say nothing of the general risks of nostalgia. Getting the port running outside of a browser (and to be able to play it in emulation pretty much makes it possible to play Pac-Man in emulation without an additional layer of synthetic hardware) isn’t quite a distraction from that awareness, but perhaps it escapes anything being overwhelming.