Found in the closet

In digging around through things, I turned up a bunch of floppies for old DOS and Windows 3.1 games. They're probably completely useless now -- doing anything with them would require the relevant OS, hardware emulation, a floppy drive, and the disks actually being good -- but at the same time it's emotionally tricky to part with them. Sniff. In among there is Darklands (a medieval RPG that I never quite got into the plot on), A-Train (a train system simulator where the world grew around the trains; tricky), Unnatural Selection (breed monsters to battle other monsters), the original Master of Orion, and RoboSport (much like RoboRally but computerized and with less interesting terrain).

Probably the best thing would be to move all of the floppies on to a single CD. SIPB would be a great place to do this if it existed. watertown might be coerced into working too. I bet there's a Linux DOS emulator that could be told "yeah, um, just use this floppy image file", and at least one of them would work.

Potential projects

So I have this laptop...what can I do with it? A couple of arguably interesting programming projects come to mind (beyond nuclearpolymer's)...

• More TIGER stuff. In particular, I'd like to build a useful database out of the data files, instead of just slurping them into a similarly-structured database. Right now things like route-finding are a little tricky. But then...what?

• Write a game. I have this vague concept. It should involve spaceships. And planets. And be kinda like Master of Orion, but without predefined interplanetary routes, and with some sort of trade or supply chain system. Feels like a daunting project, though, and neither UI nor AI is one of my strong points.

• XSL:FO engine. There are already two free ones, but they both kind of suck in various ways. Insanely geeky, though.