<i>> the DOS and Mega Drive versions, actually did Dark Castle a great disservice. They offered garish, blocky, color renditions of Pierce's detailed, hand-drawn, black-and-white artwork, and they paired this with an inferior animation engine and awkward, slow gamepad and keyboard-only control setups that muddied the precise and idiosyncratic mouse and keyboard controls of the Mac original.</i><p>Indeed. I remember playing the DOS version on an 8086 (an Amstrad PC-1512 DD) when I was a kid (thanks to this article. I had totally forgotten about it, but this brought the memories back!). I remember being intrigued by the ambience and setting, but finding the game quite unplayable. Probably not only because it was the DOS version and the controls were terrible, but also because the computer was not up to scratch, it lagged a lot. I very rarely could pass the first level I encountered (and I wasn't a bad player, I completed various games in the DOS era, but it was just hard with so much lag and bad controls). I still played quite a bit more than the experience on that version/setup deserved, which goes to show that I found something special in it.<p>Time to find an emulator and play it as it was meant to be played once and for all, I guess!