Wow, there's a name I haven't seen for awhile. He made an entire suite of apps for editing or rolling your own Sierra adventure games about 15 years ago. He got quite mad at my "helpful" coding suggestions back in the day... sorry, I was 12 O_O
I just had a look and the mega-tokyo.com forum seems to be gone forever. Basically someone asked for help about a syntax error, and I said something like 'if you get a "no closing brace error" just insert right curly braces at the very end if your code until it compiles.'
I think I even included a "code sample" }}}}}}}}}}. Brian did not like that at all!!
Once my 12 year old hubris ran out, I gave up on trying to make "AAA" games by myself :-)
It's reassuring to know that I wasn't the only 12 year old coder full of hubris and idiocy :D I tried to find some of the old coding forums to apologise, but most of them have disappeared from the internet...
I love writing code for old PCs. A couple of years ago i wrote a 3D maze engine in C that i wanted to run in the original IBM PC i was building (here is a video from running on a 286 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfbQIvRYph4 with turbo turned off, i also managed to make it run in the IBM PC but that was some months later after i built it and didn't took a video). The renderer basically rasterizes sideways trapezoids in a column edge (top bottom) array and then draws it (the height also acts as an one dimensional depth buffer). It took me a while to make it run in interactive speeds, originally needing several seconds to draw each frame. I tried a bunch of methods and i ended up generating machine code for drawing 4 columns (CGA packs 4 pixels in one byte) for different heights in one go with a small post step to fix (clear/draw) the few individual pixels for each column in the batch and keeping the height and colors for the previous frame so that only changed columns are being drawn. I wanted to make some sort of turn-based dungeon crawler, although it would be a sci-fi one set on the moon :-P. I moved since then and my IBM PC is still in boxes since i do not have much space available (and i might move again soon so i don't want to unbox it because i had some professionals package it to avoid any damages).
I also made a small "hunt the wumpus"-ish game for CGA too http://runtimeterror.com/games/cgacave/ - this time the shots are from my IBM PC and not the 286. Also as a bonus a small program i wrote in Delphi 1.0 in Windows 3.1 to create the tiles :-). I've actually done a bunch of stuff in Delphi 1.0 because is a nice middle road between retro and modern (considering that i do a lot of "serious" stuff in Lazarus anyway). Last year i wrote a 3D editor for Windows 3.1 on it (http://i.imgur.com/eG34QXV.png and http://i.imgur.com/BZz6f9l.png the second one took a 486 laptop i have here some hours to render :-P).
I have a bunch of other stuff on my YouTube channel, most are random things i'm working on but i also have a few retrocoding works like another 3D maze in VB1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxhXjkogahs (i extended that a bit later http://imgur.com/gJXwCoj but got bored after a while) and an ultima-like engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRjdbUjZX0 (this one has its own scripting language, image editor and map editor too - you can see them here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W70_G9LeByE) which i've managed to run in my 286 too with an IBM CGA monitor (the 286 has an EGA compatible graphic card with a CGA compatibility mode... sadly it is 16bit ISA and it doesn't work on the IBM PC because i'd like to have an IBM EGA card - and an IBM EGA monitor, but those are very rare and even more expensive).
Bonus photos from my IBM PC (without the monitor, i took those before i finished building it):
Also i have and collect a bunch of old development software (mainly from ebay), including Borland C++ 5, C++ Builder 1, Visual Basic 4, Visual Basic 5, Klik&Play (including the manual), Delphi 2, JBuilder and some other things i forget. I usually image those to play around in VMs and keep the disks on my shelf.
Interestingly enough i found a couple of those actually useful (specifically Borland C++ 5 and C++ Builder) and i'm now using for beyond just playing around (mainly Borland C++ 5 because the IDE is lightning fast for compiling C code). Also i wrote a few patches for old games with C++ Builder which made it deal because of the small executable size and being able to design the window visually :-).
You might enjoy PICO-8 (http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php). Although its not a real old computer, there is an active community with a good amount of users and it has it's own set of weird constraints that encourage making small things.
https://youtu.be/Hvx4xXhZMrU (~11 mins)
It offers insight into how old-school game developers worked within the limitations of the hardware they designed for.