I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, so I developed an itch to play some old arcade games. Sadly, these games are so old that they will not install in MS Vista. (Not even in WIN 95 mode!) Happily, some operating-system geeks put together a package that will emulate an entire MS-DOS machine and run that “soft” machine as an application in a window. (You can find it here.)

I was delighted when the DOS shell began running these old games, but on launching the game Defender I hit a snag. Only the game’s intro screen displayed, so the game still would not play. What had I missed? On a second look at the keyboard options, I found the problem. I had ignored the most important keystroke: “q” to drop a virtual quarter into the game. Now that’s authentic!