One of the things I miss about those days is that the graphics and physics was done in software. That meant that the features weren't determined by industry st

One of the things I miss about those days is that the graphics and physics was done in software. That meant that the features weren't determined by industry standard APIs and what sort of hardware accelerators your customer had, they were just something you make up as you go along. Resolution and/or framerate were usually abysmal, but on the other hand you might try out some new game and it would do something weird and surprising that you didn't even know was possible. There's something satisfying about knowing that someone could just start with a blank editor and create a whole world from first principles, and that's how a lot of games were made.