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In 1995, I had a Dell 486/33 that I used for gaming and writing with WordPerfect. It ran MS-DOS 6.x and Windows 3.1. I remember buying it on sale at Costco; it came with a ton of pre-installed software. It was a pizza-box style case, with only three(?) expansion slots, and no free drive bays; I recall being upset that I could not add a CD-ROM (and it seemed that most new software was moving away from distribution on floppy disk). I later added an original (used) Ad-Lib sound card and then a game port card that never worked well. About the same time, I upgraded from 4 meg to the maximum of 8 meg of RAM. In 1998, I moved cross-country to attended grad school, and the system was passed along to a family friend. I hope that someone remembered to wipe the hard drive. In about the early-1990s, I also purchased an Atari 2600, and I slowly amassed a decent library of games for it, so I was occasionally playing games on that as well. I was only dimly aware of the SNES/Genesis/PlayStation in 1995; console gaming did not much interest me, and I did not read any gaming magazines -- just Byte.

There is no simple answer to this question; there have been many lawsuits about video game design since the early-1980s. There were multiple actions considering various Pac-Man clones, for example -- some were successful, others were not. The guidelines are far from being clear.

It is not, strictly speaking, PC-related, but there is a corporate history of Intel (published in about the early-1990s) that covers some of this ground. Unfortunately, I cannot provide the citation as my copy is currently packed away in storage. There is also the classic Soul of New Machine (1981) which gets deeply into the technical details and trade-offs of designing a computer -- albeit not a PC, but getting closer to your specific interests.

Everything is dumped into a file folder, which is stored in a box with the consoles, controllers, etc. Cartridges are in a different box. Were I actively playing with my collection, I would probably have a better solution, but it has been in storage for some 20 years now.

That sounds really complex for a 2600 game. There are not too many fighting games on the system, and the only title that I can think of with an overhead view is Boxing. Could it possibly have been a computer game? Fighting games were not really common on consoles until well past the "Classic" era.

I have never seen systems bundled in shrinkwrap around here. Sometimes the console, cables, etc. will be wrapped together in heavy packing tape, rarely the bare console is on the shelf and the other bits are kept in back, more often the various pieces will each be sold separately (if they are available at all).

I was relatively late getting into both the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2, and I did very much the same thing -- I bought whatever looked interesting and was reasonably priced. Alas, far too many of these games are still in their original shrink-wrap. A few years ago, I did some weeding of titles that I know that I will never play (e.g. racing games), and donated them to a local thrift shop for some lucky reseller. There is no point in wasting storage space on something that I do not want.

For what it's worth, I never saw these at my local Zeller's store, and I regularly checked the electronics department for new titles from about 1984 onwards. They still stocked Atari 2600 cartridges (albeit mostly remaindered titles) until the early-1990s.

Canadians (and I assume also Americans) living in reasonable proximity to the international border go cross border shopping frequently. Back in the 1980s, most of my Atari games (and not a few of my Coco games) were all purchased during trips to the US. Even considering the exchange rate, prices were better than at home. Often the selection was much better, too. Sears-branded 2600 games are the very same thing. They were never sold in Canadian stores, but at least a few people brought home consoles/cartridges, yet these occasionally appear on the secondary market. Online sales and international marketplaces have blurred these lines much more so than in the past.

I have never used PAL hardware myself, but I remember some discussion in the magazines that PAL systems cannot display artifact colours; the games just display in black and white. I suspect that may be (at least part of) your problem. Can you get colours using the lower resolution graphics modes? Try quickly putting together something in BASIC to check.

Zellers was (until recently) a major discount department store chain in Canada -- think of a slightly up-market version of Wal-Mart. They had various store-brand products, but they did not manufacture anything themselves. They would have purchased the games from a supplier (either the original manufacturer or a distributor). It is not known who the original manufacturer of these games was. It is my personal theory that the store-brand games sold by the German discount department store chain Quelle came from the very same source, but I have no evidence to prove that.

Around here, most places use thermal printers for receipts -- so no ink is involved. Take a hair dryer (or other heat source) to it, and it will become uniformly black very quickly. Old faxes (and 1970s/80s-era photocopies) suffer the very same fate, albeit more slowly. I have even seen some dot matrix printouts fade into illegibility after just a few years.

I suppose that it depends on what it is that you are collecting. Not all possible collectibles come in neat sets, complete with formal lists or catalogues or checklists. My main collecting interest is books -- especially titles relating to architecture and Canadian history. I presently own ca. 6,500 volumes, and I am still slowly growing my collection. There is no way that I will ever be able to acquire everything on these topics, nor do I wish to do so. There are a few specific items that I would like to complete, but that is a low priority. Related to the above, I also collect prints/drawings of interesting, old buildings. I am not trying to establish a formal gallery so I am very selective about what I acquire. Again, it is not physically possible to acquire everything out there; as others have mentioned, I have only finite space to store and/or display my "treasures".

I had a 1000 SL that came with 384K memory. I also had a problem running many games that used the enhanced graphics since there was no separate, dedicated graphics RAM. I was largely limited to standard CGA titles. I know that King's Quest 4 would definitely not run. There was a hidden option with the BIOS setup to allocate less memory to graphics, but this ran the risk of crashing the system.

Is anyone else reminded of WebTV (and other, similar products from the mid-1990s)? While I remain skeptical that it will ever be produced, I also wonder what the target market is -- beyond those people who just want something new with the Atari logo on it. What exactly does it do that a decent laptop cannot do better/easier?

I agree. Within the last decade, Zellers, Sears (Canada), and Target (Canada) all went through this process. The things that most people want/need -- groceries, cleaning supplies, clothing -- never got deeply discounted until the selection was extremely limited. There were a few bargains, but finding them required visiting multiple stores and much searching of shelves. I never did see any significant discount applied to video games (or DVDs), and the special display fixtures were to be returned directly to the distributor rather than being sold. I actually checked on this directly. Prices may have been more reasonable for things like shelving and pallet-jacks, but I never really looked at that stuff.

The first computer that I ever used was a TRS-80 Model III. This would have been in Elementary School, in about 1982/83. I may be mis-remembering, but I swear that the screen had a slightly bluish tint to it; it was very definitely off-white. As blue was not an option in the poll, I voted for white. Perhaps surprisingly, I never used an amber or green monitor (except very briefly with a vintage PC in the late-1990s).

Ah, memories! I had Bill Barden's Assembly Language book and the Color Computer graphics book many years ago. I think that I also had Shamus (on cassette). I don't recall having ever seen Color Profile or the budget management system; is that OS-9 software?

What about a cabinet with multiple, shallow drawers? I'm thinking something like what a museum uses to store small artifacts; look at the storage of watches or coins or military medals to get the general idea. Depending on the width of the drawer, you could store several cards side-by-side. The challenge may be finding an existing solution rather than built it yourself; to not waste space, you would not want standard-depth drawers.

Was the Learning Lab actually released on cartridge? If (admittedly dim) memory serves, it was just on cassette.

Um, not everybody has a Target store close at hand, sometimes it is necessary (or, at least, easier) to buy stuff on the secondary market. The nearest Target store to where I live, for example, is some 270 miles -- and an International Border -- away. Given that it is located in a rather small town, there is no guarantee that the store would even have any in stock.

Oddly, that PDF skips pages 25 through 124, so it lacks the Exus business plan.

Now that is an interesting find! It is always great to find something about these defunct companies with a bit more depth than just press releases and advertising copy. The online link does not work for me, but (happily) my local library holds a copy of the book.

Slightly O/T, but back in about the mid-1970s, my Mother won a local contest for a huge quantity of groceries. We did not get to select what we wanted; the prize was predetermined. This assortment included a large bag of cat litter (which was of rather limited value since we did not have a cat).

As a general rule, anything developed on work time is owned by the employer. Of course an individual employment contract can modify those terms. Academic faculty, for example, generally own their research and teaching materials -- even though they were paid to develop that material. In practical terms, the rules are undoubtedly a bit looser. I still have a CDR backup of the above-noted website that I developed. If a project was cancelled because the company went out of business (or just ceased to develop for a specific platform), I cannot imagine that anyone would be actively monitoring to ensure that no work product left the building.