Here’s a Canadian game maker who develops retro games and many of these games are not only fun but portable! Iteration Games has several original old-style games available for free download on their website. I tested out three games but there are several more that you can try out on your flash drive, depending on your tastes: Joust 3: Revenge of the Lava Troll is a scrolling game based on the Joust arcade, lockOn is an asteroids-like shooter game and The Life in Matter is a single key game.

Spy Hunter is one of my all-time favorite games. For a long time, I’ve been playing Highway Pursuit, which is a 3D remake of Spy Hunter and one of the best clones I’ve ever played. Unfortunately, it has an installation program and makes entries into the registry, so it’s not portable!

Another Spy Hunter clone is Kamikaze Racer. This game is 2D, about 9MB and truly portable. Although it is not as fun as Highway Pursuit and not as good as the original Spy Hunter, it’s the best PC version I’ve found to date. Hopefully, someone will come out with a better portable remake of the classic Spy Hunter soon! You can download this game here: Kamikaze Racer

Another alternative is to use an emulator to play the game. For example, you can play with the MAME emulator and ROM or the Commodore 64 VICE emulator and get the C64 version of Spy Hunter here.

If you’re a Mario Brothers fan, check out the portable Mega Mario. This game is under 8 MB, includes a level editor and is available for both Windows and Linux.

LifeHacker mentioned an awesome bare bones word processor recently for retro freaks called JDarkRoom. This java-based writer is a full screen text writer with no extra frills that could distract you from your writing obligations.

I thought I’d write this post with it; it sure brings back memories! A completely black screen with green text – no windows, menu bars or pop-up windows. Personally, I find it’s a wonderful tool to work with because it forces me to concentrate on content as opposed to wasting time formatting text and other things we do with our word processors when we can’t seem to get those juices flowing, like play with fonts and text colours. I also happen to prefer green (or amber) text on black backgrounds and usually change my word-processors to these colour-schemes.

Documents are saved as text files which you can then open in your usual word processor for formatting, spell checking and whatever else. Switching to your OS while writing is easily done, at least in Windows, with the ALT-TAB keys.

Since JDarkRoom is written in Java, it’s portable on a flash drive as long as the computer you plug into has the Java run-time. And at only 105 KB, it’s a great space saver for those with smaller drives.

Here’s a neat game reviewed on RetroRemakes called Driller that happens to be portable and about 22 MB.

The purpose of this game is to place a driller on 18 sections of a moon called Mitral in order to let gas escape. There is a whole story behind it and you can read it at the web site which has all the stuff contained from the original release of the game in 1987: a map, a novel and all the instructions. Through a first-person point-of-view, you drive your probe around to find the correct location to place your drill while avoiding getting shot. This remake has great graphics but I’m still figuring out to play it; people who played the original game way back in the 80s might have a shorter learning curve!