As I'm waiting for the Zork collection to make it's way to the Summer Sale (hint,hint, GoG!), I remembered subscribing to the old Softdisk "magazette" back in the day. On them they'd occasionally throw on an Eamon adventure, which were usually cool as hell (in fact, I remember writing half an adventure myself). After some digging, I found them again, and nearly all of the 250 adventures produced for it (minus 4, I believe) are actually in the public domain! After some fussing (and a couple of hours searching for everything), I got it up and running on Windows 7 64-bit.

Eamon was (mostly) text adventures, originally produced for the Apple II. Each adventure started in the Main Hall of the Adventurer's Guild, where you could purchase/sell items, buy magic, and manage your gold. Then you could pop in an adventure and off you'd go! When you decided to return (or finished the adventure), you'd return to the Main Hall to sell the loot you'd collected. Death, however, was PERMANENT.

If you're curious, it's well worth the effort (and it's minimal). Anyone else remember these?

More info on Eamon: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(computer_game]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(computer_game[/url])
Download the games here (Choose "Entire Eamon CD" for the entire PD collection): http://www.eamonag.org/lists/list-download.htm
Latest version of AppleWin (Apple II emulator; open source): http://applewin.berlios.de/
Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online (main fan site): http://www.eamonag.org/joomla/

Edited to add: My favorite is disk 37: a brilliant version of Monty Python's Quest For The Holy Grail. :)