Many tribute to old computer systems are made available in books and videos. Some examples of oldschool hardware is the Commodore 64, the Sega Megadrive or the Amiga 500 homecomputer. Sure, many interesting games were published on these machines but one computer is superior to all of them which is called the classical MS-DOS PC. MS-DOS was an operating system from Microsoft and ontop of MS-DOS many games were released. The first examples from the late 1980'er were not very advanced. The Tetris game in that time looked ugly, but the programmers learned fast how to develop advanced software.
What most people doesn't know, that typical arcade games like Streetfigther or Turrican were released for MS-DOS as well. And the graphics was comparable to gaming consoles. The most advanced DOS games were programmed around the year 1996. In that area, DOS was replaced by Windows and the commercial publisher stopped to develop more games. What makes MS-DOS unique from other gaming plattforms is, that amateurs and professional programmer can write software for this platform. All what the newbie needs is a descent C compiler, a graphics library and he can write any game he likes.
MS-DOS combines a gaming platform with an open architecture. This makes the environment superior to Commodore 64 or the Sega Megadrive. An outdated MS-DOS machine is the ideal gaming system which can tell a lot about computing history.