Building a Retro Gaming PC
-
I got an old Via Epia SP 13000 PC lying around from one of my school projects. It was only in use for the duration of the project and has been lying idle since.
It occured to me that I could make it into a box dedicated to old retro games like Pac Man, Styxx, Tetris, Paratroopers, Dig Dug, Snake, Rouge etc etc.
Questions is: what would be the best solution? I'm wondering if there's a light weight Linux distro I can use. (I's like to have to boot as snappy as possible.) Or is maybe there's a game emulator OS which I can install? I don't have a spare windows license, and it seem like an overkill.
Anyone had any experience in this department? Any ideas?
-
-
I think I'll try to install XUbuntu and Mame. Hopefully I can work out how to make it load a simple menu screen on boot.
If that goes well I'm considering throwing out the old case and build my own. Mainly because it come dangerously close to overheating in the existing cramped case. Doesn't help that it got big fat IDE cables for the harddrive and CD drive. I don't think I need the CD drive, I can just use USB sticks to load new data on to it.
So that probably also means a new 2.5" SATA HD. I can go for the low end there as I don't need much storage. Maybe I can go solid state. Either a SSD HD, or do a cheaper version with a memory stick and adapter - think I heard that might work.One week until I have three weeks of works. Need to get cracking on thinking out ideas for a case design. Maybe something inspired by the old games them selves...
-
I was once contemplating a similar project not so long ago, I have a bunch of P4's laying around doing nothing and a bunch of 21" crt monitors that would cost me more to get rid of.
I don't mind booting into windows as they all have XP pro licenses and pretty decent video cards and stacked with ddr2 ram.
What I wanted to do is somehow build an arcade style box to house these rigs and once completed I can have my childhood dream of a Donkey Kong, Asteroids and Xevious machine. Too bad my kids have zero interest in those retro milestone games, as if they had I'd probably have done it a while back. -
Kids these days... What's wrong with a giant pixel beating the crap out of another pixel? tsk tsk!
(btw, why not build one for yourself?
) -
I'm thinking about building a rig with Win 98 so I can play syndicate wars on it.
Advertisement