Software from the past you'd like to see return

This came up on another board I'm monitoring, makes for an interesting discussion. Some of my favorite programs from years gone past have never been ported over to newer platforms. I'd buy them in a minute if they were.

I recently bought Riven and Tetris for my iPad.

Wish I had:
* Flying Toasters
* Gravitation
* PFS Professional File

What, no Pong?

Frogger

No, never was a gamer. If I'm going to waste time I want to get something out of it.

The pinball game for Windows. It has a bug or two, but is fairly excellent - and hasn't been ported forward for a couple of Windows versions because they no longer have any engineers who understand it.

Back in my Windows days I used a lot of McAfee software, along with Peter Norton.

Now a very strange life has come to a very strange end.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57591682

By the way, I found a version of flying toasters for Mac.

NoCoPilot wrote:

* Gravitation

Gravitation was a solar system simulation, two dimensional, but you could load any number of orbiting objects and any number of "suns," or large celestial bodies.  You could adjust velocity and mass of anything.  You could "pin" the sun(s) or let them be pulled by gravity.

By playing -- for hours and hours -- with the parameters of orbital dynamics, one got a real sense of how unusual a stable orbit really is. How incredibly unlikely a capture is.  How having more than one large celestial body doomed the scenario almost immediately to self-destruction.

I had a file folder of saved scenarios, where unusual things happened: Lorenz attractors.  Temporary captures. Stable counter-directional orbits.  These were the results, mostly accidental, of hours and hours of play.

Which is why the novel I'm reading, "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu, is ringing my BS filter bell.  In it, the protagonist keeps playing an AI video game with a stable system of three suns.

Such a thing is impossible.

Three orbiting bodies, with relatively minor gravitational pull on each other, yes that can be constructed. But not a solar system with three large bodies.

Never happen.

There's a reason "the three-body problem" is a physics problem that cannot be solved.

The book -- I'm halfway through -- is described on the cover as "groundbreaking" and "enormous [in] scope and vision" and "profound" and "a blend of scientific and philosophical speculation."

It's turning out, though, to be one of those novels where confusion and lack of precision are interpreted as profundity.

Lost interest.  Skipped ahead to the author's postscript:

Cixin Liu wrote:

Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent, but perhaps tomorrow we'll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the moon parked in orbit.  The appearance of extraterrestrial intelligence will force humanity to confront an Other.  Before then, humanity as a whole will never have had an external counterpart.  The appearance of this Other, or mere knowledge of its existence, will impact our civilization in unpredictable ways.

There be some fuzzy thinking.  "Never confronted an Other"?  Is it lack of knowledge or lack of imagination that prevents him from even considering the possibility that other species on this planet are sentient?  We don't talk to THEM, and we share the same air and water and biological basis with them.  What make him think aliens from a totally different galaxy and likely different biology therefore would be easier to talk to?

"Spaceships the size of a moon" suddenly appearing in orbit without warning?  Somebody's been watching too much "Star Wars."

Bah.