First of all. fantastic! As documented in the book _Soul of a New Machine_, Adventure plays a central role in the bring up of the DG "Eagle" / MV8000 machine. It seems to not list it (even if no copies survive) would be a gap.
It was a sort of way to learn code. What does this asm opcode do or this basic function do. As you typed it in. In a way it was like long form watching gif images stream in during the early internet.
Modems we expensive and compuserve or the source charged an hourly rate. If you lived in a city with a node it wasn’t horrible but with long distance it was obscene.
I remember when analog computing came up with a checksum program to check the listing. Game changer. You could be assured your work wasn’t in vein. Pretty soon all the magazines had one and typing in the code was a way to get a cheap game compared to $30-40 for a rom game or disk. All it cost was some time at night playing with your computer. Typing in code to see your machine do something you’d never seen before. A technique or trick. A magical time.
I have an Intel NUC from 2018. It has tpm 2.0, 16gb of ram but a cpu deemed too old. It’s faster than my sisters surface 2 laptop that I just upgraded for her that was released in the same year. I guess some cpus are more equal than others. The amount of e-waste from this blockage is going to be incredible.
Bill Gates once said that to emulate Steve Jobs you need to be part genius and part asshole. “So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they are missing is the genius part”.
Probably depends on how the patch is applied.
Is it a file by file update inside the game image.
Is it a block level transformation. I could also imagine developer nuking the image and download it all again fresh “just to be sure”.
Accept my condolence for your family in this time of sorrow. The QMODEM program was transformative in my life. Through USR robotics HST modem and QMODEM I was able to access a world far beyond the rural life in which I lived. The generousity of his shareware program probably touched more people than you will know.