Anyone remembers this one? (The Incredible Machine)

Played the hell outta that one when I was a kiddo. They used one of the early drm methods too. Something like every page in the instruction manual had little pictures and when you booted up the game it would ask for a random assortment of three of those, so you had to have a copy of the manual to load the game

Sure do! This one is tricky to get running smoothly in a real DOS environment; I think of it as a kind of meta-mimetic fallacy vis-a-vis the Rube Goldberg-esque gameplay. VIA Ezra-T CPU with variable bus clock multiplier for the win!

I recently found a similar style game on mobile. My kid loves playing it, just as I loved this back in the day.

Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.filimundus.inventioneers

Apple https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inventioneers/id926202053

There’s also this, made by people who worked on the original.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker/

I played a lot of the second game. I borrowed it from the library on a whim and it captured my imagination like very few other things did. I remember always checking the CD-ROMS in every visit after that to see if it was available again, and snatching it to every time it was.

I remember my child self always wanted to build pinball tables with the crocodiles to hit a super bouncy ball, then readjust things slightly to see how it would run slightly differently.