As an old fogey, I can recall the days where you had to take real handwritten notes, and possibly even draw maps, when playing CRPG games. I was reading a post on the Ultima 4+5+6 game card where a guy still has his notes from playing Ultima 5 back in the "good old days".

I still have a few spiral-bound notebooks around here with game notes, and even a whole bunch of maps on graph paper from when I played Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday. But I can remember playing Ultima 6 and using a DOS program called "Tornado Notes" to make notes while I played. You needed to load TN and U6 both into memory at the same time (Tornado was a TSR "terminate and stay ready" program that resided in the background of your computer). As you would play U6, you could hit a certain hot-key and U6 would swap out, and Tornado Notes would swap-in, and you created "stacks" of notes, like little 3M Post-It Notes, with your game info on them. It was a great program, and you could almost instantly find any old note just by typing "g" (for "get") and then a couple letters of the word. Similar to the way Google suggests words as you type. I can't seem to find my old Tornado Notes stacks any more, though.

Anyway, I'm sure there are some other interesting and creative ways people used to make RPG notes and I just wanted to hear some! Nowadays most games keep "journals" and "quest logs" of your gameplay, and maps are fully annotated.

But it seems like you could play the old RPG games in a "window" on your desktop, and have full access to any other program you want! What "other program" do people use to take game notes for old games these days?

I never bothered. Perhaps that's why I always used to suck at those games. And why these days I have such a hard time returning to the game if I've left it for a while.

God bless the person that invented the task list.

I have one notebook filled with stuff from the days I'd play text adventures. I sucked so much at them but damn did I get passionate! One of these days I'll have to get back into that scene.

In terms of nowadays — I haven't had to, but you just made me realise how to make playing a lot of the older rpgs on GOG a much better experience, as I didn't grow up with them. I reckon Evernote would be the perfect thing to have running in the background, as you've got the awesome organisation and ability to throw in screen captures and so on. You could even have it running on your phone instead of on your actual pc. Plus, it's free!

I never did for rpg's for some reason. Now fighting games thats a different story. I think I mapped out the controls for Mortal Kombat trilogy and a good few wrestling games when I was wee. :D

At the moment, I am using a laptop next to my gaming desktop to take notes, but I'm thinking in the future of either using the Trillian overlay, but that would be messy, or doing a custom site to use with the Steam overlay, which I could organize just like I want it to be.

Yeah, I used to have tons of maps on graph paper and notes for those Gold Box games. Especially that one area in Pool of Radiance with all the teleporters. They have been lost over the half a dozen moves I have made in the past 20 years, but I do remember them!

I also remember making extensive notes for Starflight, Starflight 2, and Star Control 2 to keep track of all the dialogue hints and whatnot.

To this day, I am still most comfortable jotting down notes on a piece of paper rather than using in-game utilities. The act of writing makes me remember it better; if not the actual details, at least the fact that I made a note regarding that subject.

Ditto. You and I must be the old fogies who went to highschool before mini-tape recorders and laptops. I still always keep a spiral notebook around for stuff like that. 1st person to ask "Whats a spiral notebook?" gets slapped!
Side Note
Has anyone EVER used the ingame notebooks that come with some games? The Thief series comes to mind as one of those, but their are a few others. There is an option during play to go to your notebook and when you do it gives you a blank page and a cursor so you can actually take notes. Kind of a pain to be honest.

I graduated high school in '94. So I was in college when AOL happened and the 'internet' as we now know it started evolving. I think one of my friends got a notebook that was little more than a black and white word processor in my senior year of high school. He was so proud of that thing! Never, and it does sound like a pain.

This is a cool nostalgic tug.
I hadn't thought about this sort of interaction with games in a while.
Not only did I need to do this for early RPGs, but before that I was keepin mad notes on my DOS era adventure games.
The kind with the text parser and even remember havin to do that with early 90s point and click until the internet came into my life.

Spiral notebooks? Too fancy for me - I just scribbed things down on loose sheets of paper. Sometimes that involved vague attempts at organizing the entries into tables or the like (reagent/price lists for each city, etc), but usually it was just haphazard as-I-came-to-it writing.

I don't usually use in-game notebooks but I did take advantage of automaps like those in the Ultima Underworld games that you could add your own annotations to.

Ooh, yes that was a nice one! I could never figure out exactly how to use that eraser accurately... so if I needed to erase a notation, to move it over for example, I was constantly erasing the WRONG NOTE and even forgetting what that "wrong note" used to say! D'oh! I'm afraid I don't follow what this is all about, but it sounds interesting. What is a Trillian or Steam overlay? What are you overlaying on to? Thanks. Yes, definitely with the text adventures. Just recently I replayed a little Tex Murphy Martian Memorandum... and I had to make very tedious notes whenever you talk to somebody, to write down EXACTLY what response you gave to each dialog choice. Because one wrong answer, and... BOOM... they kicked you out the door! And you had to go back in, and use your notes to know which answers NOT to use the next time! I think we used to call these "the good old days"???

Class of '94 myself.

The overlay is a screen which pop-up over your game when you press a hotkey, like this. The Steam one has a web browser, while Trillian is an instant messaging program.

I remember using the in-game notes in Ravenloft series many years ago. Other than that, no, I do not really take notes, but then again that is because I am such a lazy gamer that I almost always use walkthroughs :-)

When I was a kid, there already was Fallout and Baldur's Gate, so I didn't need notes. (well, my first RPG was Ishar, but I sucked pretty bad at this :P)

But.. I did and I do a lot of notes for adventure games. Especially for classic puzzles. I don't click and see what happens, I plan how to solve the puzzle on a paper first.