Wow, hadn't thought about this in a LONG long time! I used to make many notes while playing adventure and RPG games. I mapped all of Buck Rogers Countdown back in the day, and still have reams of notes from that one. That's probably the last time I did that.
Somewhere back in the (90s?) I ran across a PC program called Tornado Notes. It was a DOS (ASCII text only) product for quickly creating and finding notes. It was kinda like creating "PostIt(tm) notes" on your computer, and you would create "stacks" of these notes. To find any previous old note, you type "G" for Get, and then start typing the word you looked for. As you typed more letters, the program would continually scan through the notes looking for that combination of letters in sequence, and show you "graphically" how many "hits" you had so far. At any point, with sufficiently few hits gathered, you could hit Enter and use the arrow keys to scroll through the results. It was kinda like the "predictive suggestions" you see in your browser when you search for something in Google, and it tries to "predict" what you're going to ask. Only this was like 25 years ago, but only for stuff you personally stored.
Anywho... I remember using Tornado Notes with Ultima 6 to take notes. In fact, I also remember another program I had called Software Carousel. SC was a "multitasking" program (really just a "manual task switcher") that at the touch of a keystroke would swap the current program out of RAM to disk, and swapping IN to RAM whatever the next program "on the carousel" was. I could switch between U6 and TN, back and forth, to take notes for the entire game! That's the only game I ever did that with, but I really loved that Tornado Notes DOS program. I believe the company was something like "InfoLogic" and they eventually created a windows version called "Info Select", and they may even be out of business by now (I'm guessing).
Of course, these days you only need to bring up ANY text editor in a window beside your game, or just Alt-Tab between programs with ease (sometimes). Or use a pen and paper! 8)
Post edited July 12, 2016 by tritone