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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

While on the subject of old games, does anyone have access to a working version of "Vogon Poetry"? This was a shoot-em-up game bundled with Sidekick Plus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/03/21/s...

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Saw that you've been looking for this for a few years, so I decided to take a crack at it. I was able to get it working.

I obtained disk images for SideKick plus from https://winworldpc.com/product/sidekick/plus. Using 86Box as an emulator (Window-only, unfortunately. PCem or DosBox might work OK as Windows alternatives), I then:

1. Installed MS-DOS

2. Installed SideKick Plus

3. Ran 'install' from 'c:\skplus'

4. Added a new configuration with Vogon Poetry enabled. Called it 'skplus2.com'.

5. Ran 'skplus2.com'

6. Hit ctrl-alt

7. Selected 'Vogon Poetry'

I've put together an preconfigured 86Box installation that you can just unzip and run. To actually start the game, run 86Box.exe, then 'cd c:\skplus', then 'skplus2' (note the '2'). Then press ctrl-alt once or twice.

Video demonstration: https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvBLRLPXTc9ihVPL0VMtzexUmw8k?e=cVtKxj

Preconfigured 86Box installation: https://jmn.link/sidekick-vogon-poetry.zip

This is really excellent, what a nice thing to do. Also interesting for others of us; I'd not heard of 86box before

Awesome! Thanks so much for this! I will take a look just as soon as I can.

I tried googling for this and about the only result I found was this post[1]... written by you, exactly six years ago, asking the same question. Good hunting, SeanDav :)

(I did find some download links for various things labeled as "borland sidekick", but I'm going to guess you've been down this road already.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857137

>"I did find some download links for various things labeled as "borland sidekick", but I'm going to guess you've been down this road already"

Thanks for your efforts! Yes I did go down that route, but not with much success.

I'm frequently using Wikipedia and similar sources as entry points for old games. E.g. recently I finally recovered a bunch of small DOS games that were bundled on some demo disc—since I was particularly interested in a Pong clone, I went through the list of Pong clones on Wikipedia and spotted the familiar company name. So if you remember any metadata apart from the Sidekick connection, you might want to try those angles.

(The game itself, ‘PLBM Pong’, had settings for many parameters, e.g. the initial speed and acceleration on each turn—so you could start at a crawl pace and proceed to test your reaction speed. PLBM turned out to be a one-man operation.)

To add on the methods: categories on Wikipedia are pretty useful for such digging.

However, there's an annoyance that, although lots of pages have uniform infoboxes, you can't just ‘query’ pages in a category by an infobox field, or sort them by one—like the release year for games. At least I haven't found such a service, and Wikidata has less info. However you can rig something up with the API: e.g. the wptools package for Python parses infoboxes before you even ask it specifically.

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