I'm a Super Mario 64 ROM hacker and habitual modder and I went down a rather different rabbit hole than usual today.
I'm Australian, and I received Lego Island via the Scholastic Book Club Catalogue in the '90s. This catalogue also had the Magic School Bus games and other educational products on CD-ROM for Win9x.
One of these CD's that I had was Tom Sawyer (1996) in the Living Classics collection published by Europress.
It's mostly an abridged version of The Adventures of Tom Story novel with little animations on the page and clickable words and stuff, including 3 tiny minigames like whitewashing the fence, but it also came with a unique 3 level game called Tom Sawyer's Incredible Adventure. There is no dump of this CD online as far as I can tell. Sadly my parents threw out all my childhood stuff in the '00s. This little game is the earliest game I can remember beating 100% so it has a lot of nostalgia value for me. Searching for it online I've seen it holds a similar value for other people as well. On top of that, it is unnecessarily good, the dev must have had fun making it. It was one of those bonus games with almost no educational value whatsoever included by angelic devs for the poor kids whose parents wouldn't buy them real games.
Anyway, all is not lost as Europress had many CDs for their magazines and such that advertised their product library. One of these is the Big Bonus CD which is available on archive.org. Tom Sawyer's Incredible Adventure is included on this compilation.
To summarise the objective, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom is put on trial for a murder committed by Injun Joe. Tom testifies about this and subsequently fears for his life as Joe goes into hiding. This ultimately leads to Tom and Becky encountering Joe by chance after getting lost on a picnic to a cave. When they eventually return to the town, the judge decides to lock the cave and discovers Joe dead of starvation at the entrance. Tom Sawyer's Incredible Adventure is set in that cave.
As far as I know the only way to play this is using a Win95 virtual machine or DOSbox. Here is a timestamped video of someone playing it briefly:
I tend to have an attitude towards SM64 ROM hacking that anything is possible now there's decomp, but DOS is totally out of my wheelhouse. I figured this is a good place to ask - is there a way to port this to something that will play on modern PC's? Like an in-browser version or something? I'd love to shine a light on this little game and make it easily accessible for others to play at the same time. I think it was made using Klik & Play.
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