Today's casual photos - by request - and taken with a Canon digital camera, is from the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Computer Test Preperation Series, Computer Preparation for the SAT, for the IBM PC and PCjr, from 1983. Its 1983 release date ranks it among the earliest releases indicated being specifically for the PCjr. While I haven't tested this product myself and may never get around to it, the fact that it's a non-intensive text-based program leads me to believe that not only should it work on standard PC compatibles running MS-DOS, but also most MS-DOS compatibles. The difference? Basically true PC compatibles were both BIOS and Microsoft DOS compatible with the original IBM PC (Compaq was one of the first to pull this feat off), while MS-DOS compatibles were not BIOS compatible, but ran their own version of Microsoft DOS (popular MS-DOS-only systems included the TI Professional, the Tandy 2000 and the Otrona Atache' 8:16). While this often meant a degree of file compatibility (and theoretically easy software ports for willing developers/publishers), any software that made specific calls to specific locations would typically fail. Luckily MS-DOS-only compatible systems gave way to 100% or near 100% compatibles by the mid-80's, for obvious reasons, as why support a dozen niche MS-DOS-only compatible systems that each required their own version of your software, when you could just write to the "PC Compatible" spec, holding the original IBM PC as the gold standard (Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft's Flight Simulator were often the best tests of true compatibility--if your system could run those with little to no issues, you were good to go).

Lure of the Tempress: Screenshot from the first part of Lure of the Temptress, dialogue screen.

Lure of the Temptress was the debut of a new British GAG developer called Revolution Software. The game appeared in 1992, the same year Lucas Arts released its classic Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and two years after The Secret of Monkey Island and Loom. Around the same time, Sierra was releasing the fifth installment of King's Quest. In short, Lure was part of what we might call the early "Golden Age" of GAGs, when a few major companies were putting out very innovative work--but when a smaller company like Revolution (or Cyberdreams with their Darkseed game) was still able to make their presence felt with an innovative title. Lure was (and remains) a popular title for the Amiga platform, and even the DOS version I played had an Amiga-like quality to the graphics.

Lure's big gimmick is an engine called "Virtual Theater." Revolution describes this innovation on their website:

Simon the Sorcerer is one of those games that has been on my backlist for quite some time.