gee bee air rally farmer's daughters (1988)

one of my most memorable/unexpected amiga experiences was playing activision's "gee bee air rally" (a fun plane race game set in the 1920's), and stumbling into this rather sexy and well-drawn post-parachuting sequence. usually you landed in a tree, a scorched desert or a mud filled pigpen (at least you hope that's mud). but here... well, you might not be wanting to get back to the race for a while!

anyway, to my frustration decades later, there were zero screenshots of the amiga version of the scene to be found online, save a small jpeg whose lossy compression naturally destroyed the true pixel-level art (always use gif or png for these things, guys). so i installed an amiga emulator, downloaded the game disk image, hunted around for kickstart roms, fiddled with configurations, played the game for two hours until i got to the sequence in question (which naturally wouldn't appear until you had the emulator set for 100% compatibility), and finally capped it for posterity:

you're welcome. (on a related note, i also finally completed the commodore 64 "farmer's daughter" x-rated text adventure: god, those old grue-filled parser games were soooo maddening. and even don't get me started on the babel fish dispenser in infocom's version of hitchhiker's guide...)

solution to the water maze in marble madness (1986-2008)

only took me 20+ years to figure this one out; the secret level required two players. solving it was difficult enough with an commie64 emulator, which could instantly bring me back to where i was with a saved-state file... god knows how much time it would've taken with the old school hardware! 

adventure construction set advertisement (1986)

electronic arts was awesomesauce in the 1980's. i must've spent at least eight months of my adolescence making ultima style adventures with this thing on my commodore 64. the largest one was something called "otherworld" which was submitted to this particular contest. a few years back i actually salvaged all my old c64 drawings and programs using an x1541 cable and starcommander to convert the old 5-inch floppies to emulator-readable images. unfortunately, that adventure never survived the data-transition.