[Puke]

not to completely derail the topic, but if there is no longer a company arround to be the second party in the EULA, then its not really a contract. you cant have a contract between yourself and nobody. In addition, EULAs have fallen down in court several times. They tend to be about as binding as the tags you're not supposed to cut off your mattress. Its copyright law that is enforceable, not the EULA.

As a case-in-point related to the general discussion, condider the works of HP Lovecraft. for a long time, the copyrights had expired and although compilations were published - the works were in the public domain. you could download them all for free, over the web (in several places). Now, the rights to the estate are being defended again, the copyrights have been renewed, and it is no longer legal to freely distribute the literature. Granted, literature falls under slightly different laws then software (it is currently still impossible to claim ownership of the works of Shakespear or Tennyson or somebody) but the concept is similar.

Back on topic, I had totally forgotten about Blance of Power. I lost countless hours to that game, in fierce two player hotseat matches.

Speaking of hotseat, anyone remember RoboWars? God that was a great game! tactical combat controlling squads of robots, but simultanious resolution. Combat happened real time, and you would break it up to give orders. You could set it for 1 second to 60 seconds turns, so you would pile up a bunch of orders like "move HERE, crouch low, look NORTH, scan for 2 seconds (and engage enemies), stand up, move THERE, look WEST, stand TALL (to fire from behind large cover), scan for 10 seconds (and engage targets).

It was great. depending on how long you configured turns to be, you had more or less granularity of controll over combat. You could fire at point targets or spots on the ground with rockets or grenades, so that it might be possible to take out robots behind cover, or create distractions. Covering fire and bounding overwatch was very important. you could have bots firing at suspected enemy locations to draw attention from another bot that you were going to have run out from cover. the leg elevation of your Bots was very important not only for hiding behind and looking over cover, but your speed depended on how long your legs were at the moment. It also obviously affected how hard you were to hit - and since rockets and grenades took time to fly through the air and detonate (and combat resolution was realtime, after you gave your orders for the turn), it was very hard to hit a running bot without guns. It was also a good idea to run slightly PAST something you wanted to take cover behind, and then move back, just in case some splash damage from a missile was on the way.