When I was a kid, my parents bought a computer the same year I was born. They spent $5000 at the time for a top of the line machine. My dad told my mom "We'll never have to buy another computer ever." The computer was a 286 with a 30MB hard drive and 640KB of RAM. Of course we all know computers have surpassed those levels of technology by leaps and bounds.

When I was a kid, I used to play hours of a game Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. I only had the free shareware version which my parents had on 5.25" floppy disk. I would load that game up quite often. I pretty much had it at the point where I had memorized exactly how to play the game. I would load it up and in a few hours I had beaten the game.

The sad part was that at the time, the game was shareware. The first episode was given away for free in order to entice people to buy the second and the third episodes. When I was a kid, I was never able to convince my parents to but the expansions so I could see the end of the story. And by the time I had my own money, Apogee had been bought out by 3drealms and the license went into limbo. To add atop of all of that, my 286 had long bit the dust to.

A few days ago, I remembered this game from playing Super Mario Galaxy and some various nostalgic discussions. So I went looking around and found that 3drealms had made freely available for download the shareware version.

With a bit more research I found that they are also selling the whole game for only $10 bucks. And there were some suggestions to the ability to use DOSBox to run the game. So a couple of downloads later and an apt-get install. I was running Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure again. On Linux, an OS that hadn't even really been dreamed of when this program was written. On box which was hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the original box I played it on as well.

Tonight, I finished the game after having played it in a couple of blocks. I do remember the moves almost as well as when I did when I originally played it. I beat the game no problem and without even any glitches from DOSBox. I am currently in the process of ordering the full game so I can finally play through the end and see the whole game.

Now why would I write up all of this? I see a problem where we are losing parts of our culture because we are unable to archive the media that is out there. Had Apogee just folded and the assets had liquidated the game would have just been nostalgia, and maybe a couple of people who had bought the registered version would put it up on some pirate site. Which could still be lost if enough takedown notices are sent to the rest of the site and not enough copies exist.

I know I am preaching to the choir here. But please, feel free to check out Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. It is a short game, only $10 from 3drealms. And shows what even old computers were powerful of doing.

Crypto