11 ms·

Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?

• mamcx 4y ago
  I'm not sure if can or not, but Visual FoxPro is not that far from the revolutionary aspect of HyperCard/SmallTalk. This is the thing I wish to make myself (https://tablam.org https://tablam.org) to, in part, being able to run it on mobile/cloud. And Mac/Linux (Fox long ago run on Mac but that die with MS).
• umeshunni 4y ago
  Norton Commander. Still the best and most efficient way to access all your files.
• 6510 4y ago
  I forget their names but Firefox use to have 2 similar extensions. Both had a sortable table popup with filters one could apply. One extracted all tabs from the window and the other all links from the page. You could save it in various formats or copy it to clip board as links only, links with titles, bb code and html.
• casualwriter 4y ago
  Clipper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language) It pretend to be xBase language but actually close to C.
• nunez 4y ago
  Trillian and Pidgin! If you could talk to people, Trillian and/or Pidgin supported it. On that note, I miss Google Talk and Google Voice via Talk. I absolutely hate how siloed and protectionist chat platforms have become.
  • fazfq 4y ago
    ...but pidgin still works, in fact it's regularly released You could argue that it no longer does what it did, but it works
    • anthk 4y ago
      Pidgin still has a huge load of libpurple plugins for different services.
• singularity2001 4y ago
  Softice hacking environment backed by a hardware button: On the C64 there was an extension cartridge "module" called "Action Replay MK5" which would put the whole system into a REPL debug mode similar to gdb. You could inspect any memory and disassembly and write plus patch any machine code while the system was paused. There also was a diff mechanism to see which memory changed (e.g. if you lost a life).
  • tlavoie 4y ago
    I think the similar one I had was the Super Snapshot cartridge, and it was quite magical. If a game could fit in RAM, you could dump the works to an executable file, and then the cartridge had a speed-loader that made the drive much faster as well. And a drop-in debugger, as you mentioned. It really changed the way I thought of interacting with software at the time.
• andrei_says_ 4y ago
  Braid the MacOS game.
• andrewinardeer 4y ago
  Xtree Pro
• mikewarot 4y ago
  Borland Sidekick, you could pop up a text editor anywhere in the days of MS-DOS Borland Delphi 5, it was the peak of productive windows programming debug - the DOS command, you could write small programs on the fly. list - an incredibly fast file viewer by Vernon D. Buerg.
  • anthk 4y ago
    - Debug OpenBSD bundles Clang (and Perl better for small software) in base to do that in a safer way.
    • mikewarot 4y ago
      In MS-DOS you always do an INT 21h with the function in AH. 09h is print string pointed to by DX, $ terminated 4ch is terminate program, with error code in AL So you could build hello.com in short order. In Linux, the function numbers are effectively random[1], I don't see how you could build a binary and save it without a lot more work. [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/constants/syscalls.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/c...
• jmpman 4y ago
  Microsoft Project. When will they have a natively compiled version for OSX?
• 5555624 4y ago
  Lotus Magellan
• giantg2 4y ago
  It seems I can't run F22 ADF. It was an interesring game given the time it was released. However, F22 TAW basically covers it.
  • 01arjuna 4y ago
    If you like games like this, check out Tiny Combat Arena. It's EA but it is coming along.
• schwartzworld 4y ago
  PrintShop. I had it for the Apple II and had tons of fun making signs and banners to hang around the house. Technically you can still run it in an emulator, but without a dot matrix printer, it wouldn't be the same.
• tomjen3 4y ago
  Gnome Do. It had fuzzy file and application search, but where it really stood out was the application plugin system. Wanted to send a quick message to a coworker? Summon Gnome do with a shortcut, type message a space and then fuzzy complete on the coworkers name. Then just type the message right there and get back to what you were doing. It was kinda like Alfred, but just much more powerful. It got destroyed during the transition to Unity, and was never made to work again, and now that all the apps are webapps there aren't any halfway decent plugins so it wouldn't matter much.
• glmeece 4y ago
  I stuck to Mojave for essentially the same reason. Then I found out you could provision another volume, install Mojave on it, and treat the Mac like a dual-boot machine. When I need to run any of my 32-bit apps (mostly games, but there are others), I change the startup disk to that volume. I switch back to run in Monterey (still deciding on Ventura).
• hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
  Apple’s Aperture app.
• PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  Google Reader.
  • syncbehind 4y ago
    I've moved to self-hosting a miniflux instance and have been pleased with the performance for the past several years. Highly recommend.
    • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
      I'll check it out. Thanks!
• nickd2001 4y ago
  Chuckie Egg ;)
• yoav 4y ago
  Adobe Flex Builder and AIR runtime. Building desktop apps and hybrid desktop/web apps in the same language that could talk to each other for the first? time was so much fun. I built some cool apps. Have been dying to build a desktop app again and dig into what the js or other world has to offer but haven’t had time.
• rstevens333 4y ago
  Eudora.
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  Reason, Sony Vegas (with some mic emulation plugin, can't remember it) made me a good chunk of cash doing CD-ROM soundtracks back in the day, and I wish I still had that setup set up here in Linux. I also wish I could have kept my TurboCAD license for Linux somehow when I moved away from Mac OS. It would have been fun to keep learning. (Actually I admit that what frightens me is: I get those running under Wine somehow and am off and away, and just never find the time to use them again :-/) I also miss running some WinAmp 5.x skins in Linux, not sure if these are supported now. I also liked the ~2003 era internet radio stations list that came with it, in a themed window. So I use qmmp and 3.x skins. In vintage Linux software I really miss that I could do icon scaling & free icon layout in Gnome back around 2009. Not sure if that's still possible but I use XFCE now most of the time anyway. You could scale individual icons in two clicks, and turn icons into a sort of functional, interactive desktop wallpaper design that was more interesting than the standard grid.
• superkuh 4y ago
  Festival 1.96 text to speech. Festival 2.x available in modern distros does not support the 1.9 voices and the Festival 2.0 voices are far inferior. There are no comparable replacements for native text to speech on linux. Just a bunch of cloud stuff and bleeding edge things that require nvidia GPUs, etc. If an OS can't run Festival 1.96 then it can't be my main desktop. imgSeek. It requires python 2.4 among other things. It allowed me to draw crude MS Paint style images and then use them to search for similar colored/shaped images on my hard drive. There's no good replacement for it's ability and porting is non-trivial. https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/imgseek/ Also, the relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2224/ https://xkcd.com/2224/ My solution for this is to keep my old computers running old OSes and software. I build a new computer with all the new software once every 5-10 years when I'm finding I can no longer compile things.
  • anthk 4y ago
    Check Flite2 with the voice pack. A lot of them like SLT and RMS (not that RMS) are good enough.
    • superkuh 4y ago
      I assume you mean the CMU ones? They're decent for quick stuff but listening to a whole book with them is unpleasant. They don't really compare to the Nitech voices.
• illys 4y ago
  I started collecting some legacy hardware in 2018 because I missed the touch and feel of playing Digger, Popcorn, Lemmings... on real hardware (not attracted by emulators). Problem with such hardware is that when you look for a piece, you find it cheaper in a batch than alone. I've ended up so far with a nice collection 10-12 PCs from the eighties. Nicest ones are the IBM 5150, 5160 and 5162, the Compaq Deskpro 386-20 (in the original huge Compaq form factor), the original Compaq Portable 386, a pair of IBM PS/2 8530-286... I can play my old games, run Turbo Pascal programs I wrote in 1988-1990, play with x86 Assembler programming, play MOD files on PC bipper and Sound Blaster 2. In addition I can run Area5150, 8088MPH... Recent software that only run on very specific and very old hardware. No regret, it is mostly fun!
  • jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    Oh, Lemmings of course! I remember playing a black and white version on an old Mac I think (and never being able to beat the nessy level).
    • selcuka 4y ago
      You can play it in your browser: https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
      • solardev 4y ago
        Whoa, crazy. At first I thought they just made some sort of JS VM with a canvas output. Nope. Each individual lemming is its own HTML div that moves around the DOM on top of the background image... someone took a lot of time to rewrite this whole thing into basic HTML. Nutty and brilliant, lol. It's actually a much nicer experience than trying to play it in a Dosbox emulator on the web: https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html https://classicreload.com/lemmings.html
        • Fatnino 4y ago
          For the opposite experience, get lemmings from the windows store (or whatever that's called nowadays). The most cynical, half-assed, unwinable, borderline unplayable pile of crap that is trying to be passed off as lemmings. It's like they gave a first year programing student two screen shots and a bad description of the game and then ran that through even worse machine translation and the result was shipped directly to end users.
• thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
  I don’t miss it, but I remember the strangest thing. It was a Back to the Future themed interactive screensaver. I think it may have been internal use to some company - maybe AT&T was involved - and installed from a floppy disc. I remember getting stuck in it. I wonder what I actually remember of it, and tried to Google it, but found nothing. Anyone ever encounter it?
• xtracto 4y ago
  Theres a series of really good games called Commandos. I think the latest one (Commandos 3 destination berlin) only works in Windows XP, and doesnt work in "compatibility mode" in newer versions, nor in Wine.
  • coolspot 4y ago
    Commandos 3 and 2 remastered are on XBox Game Pass.
• ianai 4y ago
  Yeah the old windows defrag visualization was cool. Probably inspired some people to dig deeper. Coding in VB 1.0 was cool. I think I made a rapid color changing thing in it. Like a modern stuck pixel exerciser, but probably way too fast to work. Not sure. Mac OS X in the early versions (until like .7 maybe?) had a feel and look that’s definitely been lost. Probably mostly for the better but not exclusively. Definitely wish modern OSes would take some time to make user interfaces as fast to respond as possible and reliable enough to basically never lock up. Just give an error indicator if something’s locked up under the hood (aka background/off thread). Definitely wish modern websites were more text based.
  • anthk 4y ago
    >Mac OS X MacOS. X means ten in Roman numbers.
    • ianai 4y ago
      Which is appropriate since OS 9 immediately preceded it and was indeed the meaning of it. They rebranded it to “macOS” with Big Sur I think, or later. In the early days which I referred to it absolutely was “Mac OS X”.
      • throwayyy479087 4y ago
        That people here don’t know it was called OSX for a long time makes me feel old. It was a stupid name but still.
        • ianai 4y ago
          Felt that more than a little too. I try to remember time didn’t start the day I turned 18, and likewise have at least learned all manner of things out of date or lesser used before my time (os2/warp comes to mind) out of just general interest. Even dos qualifies here.
• xtracto 4y ago
  Double space and drive space with 'transparent ' compression was cool. I wish there was something as ubiquitous for USB drives nowadays.
  • illys 4y ago
    Disk space was scarce in that time, sustaining the usage of DoubleSpace... and write errors were common (chkdsk always found some FILE00XX.CHK lost data). When DoubleSpace was active, it was often a full partition crash instead. I've lost so much data with DoubleSpace! Not something I miss :-)
    • brokenmachine 4y ago
      OT a bit but what are you meant to do with those CHK files? Is there anything to show what they are or recover anything from them? Otherwise what's the point?
      • illys 4y ago
        You could edit them and decide to delete them (most of the time) or rename them and get back some content (for text files at least). Those files were created by chkdsk from orphan files (with no entry point in the directories) in the File Allocation Table (the table that gives the "FAT" name to the filesystem). After chkdsk, the filesystem was consistent again. Such orphans appeared when the OS crashed or the system went off during file writing operations. Of course when that happened while writing on a compressed filesystem, the problem was not a lost file but a corruption. Sometimes the compressed filesystem was just entirely lost.
    • anyfoo 4y ago
      The FILE00XX.CHK lost data may be less because of an actual error when writing, but more the result of a disk operation being interrupted. Losing power for example, or the OS crashing, resulting in "dangling" data. And in that case it's not rarely just temporary data that was meant to be free'd anyway.
  • navjack27 4y ago
• akeck 4y ago
  Google Picasa. Its ability to find local images was magical.
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    It still works though.
  • andrei_says_ 4y ago
    Picasa was incredible. It would provide instant search based on the filename, folder name and metadata on all images. Images purchased as stock have a lot of metadata in them. So Picasa was able to act as a cheap folder and metadata based digital asset management system.
  • xnx 4y ago
    Seconded. I haven't still haven't done anything that does face identification and grouping as well.
  • 6510 4y ago
    The combination of Hello and Picasa was a productivity drug. You had your deck of cards, a computer full of perfectly organized images, the opponent had his own deck. You would show some art work or photos, they would give their opinion about it, each round you would show x more works that you thought more suitable for their taste. The other player would take their turn whenever they felt like it. What they showed allowed further fine tuning the following selection until eventually you arrived at wanting to show works you didn't get to make. You debated the plan of action and the opponent waited impatiently for days, weeks or months for the follow up session. It's weird that people still call it Google Picasa and Google Hello as google contributed nothing besides freezing it and shutting it down.
• mcherm 4y ago
  Hypercard. It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.
  • josters 4y ago
    Back when it was free, I used to use LiveCode[1] for smaller projects. It's heavily inspired by HyperCard. You could run the same source code on many platforms including iOS and Android. Not sure about the state of development now, as the Community Edition has been discontinued and it seems they only offer paid plans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
  • okennedy 4y ago
    I can't emphasize this point enough. Hypercard was an amazing tool, in the same class of evolutionary steps forward as the spreadsheet. It's unfortunate that nothing's come along to replace it. (I still have fond memories of Hypercard class in high school) Relatedly, although it still exists, Apple Numbers is one of the few pieces of software that I really miss since my move to Linux. It has lots of subtle design choices that gently nudge you towards good data organization habits (e.g., If you keep an index column and title row for each dataset, you get rewarded with readable cell references).
  • dhosek 4y ago
    A classmate when I was at Harvey Mudd created an Adventure-type game called “Escape from Harvey Mudd” that got sufficient popularity that the administration requested he rename it and it became “Escape from Grid Tech.”
    • dhosek 4y ago
      (I also find myself thinking about so much software that has vanished over the years—my DVI previewer for VM/CMS plus the VAX/VMS change files for all the TeX software that I maintained in the 80s. There’s got to be a lot of even more interesting software where the only copies have almost certainly long since vanished.)
• gerdesj 4y ago
  Absolutely nothing. It can always be emulated, if you need it.
  • singularity2001 4y ago
    Not if you want to apply it to the real world, e.g. softice for mac
  • illys 4y ago
    You speak about needs, the question is about what you miss. It is about nostalgia, about time-travel... Emulation is good for just running software. But it has nothing to do with old sofware running on an old blowing PC, with a CRT monitor - sometimes green or orange -, with a clicky and heavy keyboard... It is a complete experience that emulation misses.
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      Try playing an original Star Wars arcade game or a Vectrex system; that's something you cannot really reproduce with an emulator at all.
• aerovistae 4y ago
  The game Gruntz. Amazing puzzle game from the 90s, long forgotten. It was made by the studio that went on to make F.E.A.R., the hit horror FPS for which they are better known these days.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• becurious 4y ago
  Being able to directly access sectors of a floppy disk on Windows. You could to this and read floppies with different file systems. Went away somewhere around Windows 2000 and modern external USB floppy disk drives just implement mass storage device class and you can’t access sectors or differently formatted drives.
  • anyfoo 4y ago
    Hmm. Sure about that? There may be a mixup in terminology. The mass storage device class is what USB sticks for example also uses, and that supports sector level access. In fact that's what's used, as the OS contains the file system implementation, not the device itself. This is in contrast to the "Media Transfer Protocol" that a lot of smartphones use, for example, where the filesystem implementation is abstracted away in the device, and you essentially have commands to transfer files. But there were some ways to effectively redefine the sectors themselves, e.g. formatting floppy disks with higher (or lower) capacity, independently of the file system that would sit on top (you'd still access sectors, but now there would be more or less of them). I don't know if USB floppy drivers still support that. And I also don't know whether Windows started to prevent sector-level access.
• wwweston 4y ago
  Macromedia / Adobe Fireworks, which stopped working on Macs with Catalina. By the time I'd used Fireworks alongside Photoshop and Illustrator in the mid-2000s, it started seeming ludicrous to me that Photoshop was anywhere near as prevalent as it was for screen design. Raster layers were a poor primitive, semi-parameterized raster features bolted on weren't a lot better. Fireworks was simply better as a melding of vector and bitmap capabilities from the start, and made dozens of little better tooling decisions along the way. Mobile's rise and frustration with Adobe's pricing/ownership model probably helped the industry shake off the idea that Photoshop was THE approach, so we got Sketch and Figma and others and even Adobe figured it out with specific screen-design tooling. But Fireworks got it right a lot earlier. Since Apple's hostile to even virtualizing its old environments, I've considered buying a windows license for Fw and using it that way, though I'm also getting to know Affinity's products too. Not convinced they or anything else are a true replacement yet, though.
  • timeon 4y ago
    With upgrade to Catalina I have lost contact with Adobe in general.
  • cosmotic 4y ago
    Fireworks nailed it. I was astonished how many professional designers said "what's that" when I asked if they ever used fireworks. Fireworks was extensible with Javascript. Extensibility is something lacking from all the newer replacements.
• gregjor 4y ago
  FTP itself mostly deprecated because not secure. I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.
  • wting 4y ago
    Many (most?) banking systems run on SFTP today.
    • gregjor 4y ago
      Not using a MacOS desktop FTP client, which is what the OP misses.
    • conductr 4y ago
      They used FTP heavily at a point too. I remember transferring batch wire transfer instructions by exposing a tsv file on a particular FTP server. The only security was obfuscation, it could have been bad but never was so it felt secure.
• hirundo 4y ago
  Back in the '80s there was a NORAD supercomputer called the WOPR that had cool games written specifically for it, like "Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare", and "Global Thermonuclear War." Now that the Russians are hostile again it would be nice to use those to game out current conditions. Likely there's still no winning move but we should check.
  • illys 4y ago
    Greetings Professor Falken
    • techdragon 4y ago
      Would you like to play a game?
• jmartin2683 4y ago
  That Disney roller coaster designing game from the early 90s. Also, pretty much all BBS door games. I’m sure there’s somewhere hosting them on the web, but it’s just not the same.
  • jakemauer 4y ago
    Wow I totally forgot about that Disney game. You could ride your creations in first person!
• logosmonkey 4y ago
  Glyder 2. It was a magnificent mobile game that stopped working quite a few android versions ago. I keep meaning to dig up an old phone and sideload it.
• sh4un 4y ago
• notjustanymike 4y ago
  JiTouch. The only gesture library that let me draw characters on screen to open specific apps.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  Stainless. It was a great browser that had each window as a separate instance. I really enjoy it because it was a no BS browser for Mac.
• intelVISA 4y ago
  Native/performant applications
• o4tuna 4y ago
  Xara
  • tjansen 4y ago
    +1 Yes, I really miss Corel Xara! Stopped using it when I abandoned Windows. But it seems like there is a similar application on xara.com, Xara Designer Pro. Did anyone try this?
• mannyv 4y ago
  Aldus Freehand. Still the best!
• samhuk 4y ago
  Old games around the 2000's like Battlezone 1998 (give it up for OG Activision). I feel like there are so many old games from those years that people have a strong attachment to that will gradually become harder and harder to run or find. I fear for the day when no amount of debugging and compatibility flagging and messing about will get these games to run on modern hardware. Battlezone may not be a great example because it's popular enough to have a good scene around it, but some games aren't. To illustrate such strong attachments, and also to just tell an interesting story, my father purchased Battlezone 1998 when it came out because he needed something to keep occupied while on baby-minding duties. with me. I was the baby!. He kept it for years. And years. And finally, one day, when I was an older-yet-still-very-young child, I'm helping with some cleaning or something (I don't exactly remember) and I find the game in clear transparent box! I show my father, and I remember him getting excited and firing it up on our one family's laptop. We gamed for a while and then he let me continue. I remember constantly killing myself or getting the base killed because my infantile brain couldn't understand how those damn scavengers and turrets worked. I remember that day to this day, around 15 years later. I remember grinding it for days just to get to the second stage - Mars. Wouldn't it be a shame if such software is lost to time! P.S. If anyone is on HN who was even remotely involved in that game, please know that you are a really awesome person
  • anthk 4y ago
    https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com
• brothrock 4y ago
  Johnny Castaway.
• II2II 4y ago
  Pretty much everything. As far as I can tell, there is a significant gap in modern software: there is a large catalogue of software that is intended to be easy to use but is inflexible, and a decent selection of software that is flexible yet is incredibly complex to use. A lot of software of the 1990's was both flexible yet not overwhelming to use.
  • tarsinge 4y ago
    I kind of agree with that. I think the UX field got lost in the way of being mixed with marketing for conversion and keeping engagement instead of real usage. Everything ends up with a dumbed down inefficient eye pleasing UI. I find it hard to find UX designers that want to invest in taking the time to really learn and understand expert usage instead of just seeing everything as websites to be optimised.
  • anthk 4y ago
    In the 90's there was a huge amount of software. I can count zillions of multimedia CD-ROMs even in Spanish. Now that work it's better done from a web for a lot of culture/hobbies/information related software.
• conductr 4y ago
  I’m going contrarian and will say I really don’t miss the CRT and how it burned my eyes after hours of use on a daily basis making pixel perfect web design at 1024x768 and using some of the things I see discussed on this post.
• superchroma 4y ago
  MSN Messenger. Compact and I still like the emoji.... ah, smileys that it came with. Mainly I miss the free time and the lack of social networks. Content sucks, I think. Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake.
  • HKH2 4y ago
    > Posts and statuses were definitely a mistake. Definitely. Posts and statuses led to the current 'we are all influencers' plague.
• anthk 4y ago
  - Opera 12. I know, propietary. But Otter is not as fast as Opera 12 was, not even close. By comparison, it should be screaming lightweight too under a 2007 netbook.
• contingencies 4y ago
  Quarantine, DOS. Required EMS, so you always had to EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to play.
  • M95D 4y ago
    No, you don't. Read help about MENUCONFIG, MENUITEM, SUBMENU.
    • contingencies 4y ago
      What help? I had a DOS 5 book which was the only source of information available to me at the time, being pre-modem-acquisition and pre-internet. Perhaps you're confusing with later editions? This was 1994.
      • M95D 4y ago
        C:\DOS contains HELP.COM with all DOS commands, configurations, etc. You can also search the net.
• icco 4y ago
  I miss the original sim games. Simtower being my favorite.
• jrs235 4y ago
  Sid Meyers Railroad Tycoon and Colonization
  • Delk 4y ago
    The DOS version of Railroad Tycoon runs fine on Dosbox. Unless the Amiga version or something is what you're after. I've still played the PC version occasionally on Dosbox. Despite its faults and aging, the original still seems to have something unique to it that other newer transport business games lack. Some of that is probably nostalgia but I think there's something else to it as well. Some of its bugs and limitations can be fairly annoying, and at some point I toyed with the idea of making a rewritten clone with those issues fixed kind of akin to what OpenXCom has done, but I was never able to gather the motivation to do the hard work of reverse engineering the gameplay mechanics etc.
    • jrs235 4y ago
      My favorite bug was taking out all the loans you could right away (I think it was $30,000,000). Then as you became more in debt (as interest accrued) eventually an overflow error (I assume) would occur and then magically you'd have roughly $30 million in funds to build with.
      • Delk 4y ago
        I don't think I ever found out about that particular one. The ones that I've found more annoying than amusing are things such as: - The maximum cash of 30M (10M or something in the deluxe edition), at which point you can no longer make a profit without jumping through hoops - Not a bug, but the limits on the number of trains and stations combine poorly with the above - If you have multiple rate wars at the same time, you only get the periodic status report on one of them, forcing you to play blind in the other ones - In the deluxe edition, I'm pretty sure there's an overflow or some other kind of a bug in the final score calculation that has significantly dropped my final scores on multiple occasions One that was more amusing was that I think if you bought control of two if the other companies, you were also able to access the third one (e.g. to transfer money to yourself) by using a bug in the broker menu.