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Gregory A. Garner wrote:
What? Strategic How? What flexibility?
Or consider this. How many of you are old enough to remember Infocom games?
They (or at least, everything after the original mainframe Zork) were written in a language specific to interactive fiction, and whenever a new platform came out (and at the time, new desktop platforms, incompatible with anything previously devised, were coming out every third Tuesday), all they had to do was re-implement that interactive fiction language on that new platform, and immediately their entire library became available on that platform. And it just so happens that a number of interactive fiction enthusiasts have continued to re-implement this virtual platform on new hardware, and so regardless of what hardware and OS you're running, if you can find an Infocom-compatible parser for it, and you can physically get the game files onto the box, you can run almost all of the classic Infocom games.
Now consider this. Many years ago, a really neat chess program hit the market. It was called "Distant Armies," and it played more than a dozen different historical kinds of chess. It didn't play modern European chess, and it didn't play Japanese Shogi, but it covered everything else from the truly ancient chatturanga (in two or three variants) to Chinese chess (with either traditonal or iconic pieces), to three medieval circular-board variants.
It was only available for one platform: the Commodore Amiga. It's so platform-specific that it's never been ported to anything else.
It's now every bit as extinct as the Amiga is. -- JHHL
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