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Boot into a system which allows you immediate programming

Like Bash? For me, Linux is what made computing interesting and fun again. It has easy access to programming tools, and none of this forced separation of users and developers.

(preferably with a modern OO syntax) and access to video, sound and peripherals. If there's anything that has suffered over the past three decades, it's easy access to I/O.

I admit it gets a little complex here, but for example Python (a key element in my "fun computing" experience) has nice libraries for these. For example, some of my electronics/FPGA work owe a lot to Python's serial port module. Not because the serial port is hard to program otherwise, but for making it easy to write all kinds of code around it.

I have no experience in modern graphics programming. However, I have the feeling that the bar for awesome graphics is a tad higher today than it was in "the year 64". Today's awesome is rather nontrivial at the direct low level we associate with C64 programming, so even professionals use higher level tools. (I think my background in physics and math helps appreciate 3D graphics, for example coordinate transformations using matrices are a basic (pun inteded) skill but I imagine there are lots of programmers with no need to do it.)

Nevertheless, I understand the point about recreating an environment in the '64 spirit. There are several projects around, the two I can think of at the moment being http://sol.gfxile.net/gp/ and http://pelulamu.net/ibniz/ .

...what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.

For 3D-accelerated games from that era, I've had good luck with dgVoodoo. Unaccelerated DirectDraw stuff often flat refuses to run on newer versions of Windows, but I've gotten some things to work with The DirectDraw Hack and similar programs, depending on the game.

But, that's not really what you're asking for. QEMU might be a good starting point; getting it to emulate a P3 and a Geforce 4 may be a lot of work (I haven't perused the source), but probably not impossible; I mean, it's designed to emulate selected CPUs and video cards already.

WINE is getting good, too -- I want to try this when it's working.

Most of the time, emulators can support most of what is out there.

Sure you might find something that requires very specific hardware, but that very specific hardware won't play every game from that era either. And a modern PC with emulators can play games from all kinds of eras.

For those struggling with getting old games running in Windows 7 (without emulators), I'd like to point you to this fantastic DirectDraw hack.

http://sol.gfxile.net/ddhack/

There is a pretty cool software that emulates electronic circuits which a friend wrote: http://sol.gfxile.net/atanua/ .. not sure if it has been featured here but it definitely should... great to experiment and is getting really evolved, and it's free as in be^M^M pepsi.

Also, I think you could extend the lego playground to use spaghetti and glue to build bridges and see if they support the load of the lego cars perhaps. Simple and easy and don't requite much funds to try out...Paper mache etc could also be a nice treat.. make masks off eachother or something to make it more fun.

http://sol.gfxile.net/atanua/

Not sure if it is what you are looking for. Hope it helps.

Me and few of my friends went to Chernobyl last year. The radiation levels there are indeed not that bad in general but the amount varies greatly within small distances and thus a guide with a Geiger counter is more than necessary. However, there was no place that badly radiated that any plants wouldn't survive there and the nature was really lush there so I'm certain that animals liked it there too. Even the abandoned town of Pripyat, which was hit quite badly by the radioactive falloff, had trees and greenery growing everywhere and there even was a small birch growing on a balcony in the top floor of an old hotel. In terms of radiation we probably were more exposed to it during our flight from Helsinki to Kiev than in our one day trip to the exclusion zone. And if we were to live in the town of Chernobyl (around 200-300 people still live there today even though the last reactor was shut down in the year 2000) we would probably be as safe there as in some residential area here in Finland with radon-rich soil.

All in all, I don't think it's that much about adaptation anymore.. In its natural state the area would be dense forest and thanks to the low amount of human interference that's what it's slowly turning out to be again.