So I got the micro-atx running with a variety of software, of course partitioning D: for all the emulators software, and leaving C:\ a 'pristine' windows install (Can windows be described as pristine?)
(Sidenote: Ive just found out why I find shiny things in my shoes of a morning - it appears my cat is a bowerbird and my shoes are her nest)
Next up was the actual controller parts. These came from ozstick in Melbourne, along with a IPAC. Went to Bunnings and found a nice large peice of chipboard scrap.
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Parts finially here! Beer is in order Dummy trial panel | Foreman approves Wiring finished |
Basically, i just got myself a nice 28mm drill bit and away I went (actually, I nearly ripped my arm off when I put a fresh battery in my drill) A hour of stripping and crimping later, and it was ready to go. Since the joystick has a dust protector, you can easliy use a 28mm bit for the hole.
Im skipping over the IPAC goodness as well as the wiring as its dead easy and plent of sites have already covered it.
D:\ ended up with the directories:
d:\emulators
d:\roms
d:\mamewah
Yes, mamewah featured as my front end of choice, because its more complicated than a DDR machine based on brain surgery, its customizable to a fault, and it runs well on hardware with no GFX card. The others I tried had nice smooth animations and failed on the onboard video.
So onto video card - why no video cards?
- Cost
- Space
- Heat
I could have got a cheapo-card and got a ribbon PCI-E riser, but.. for what? a nicer frontend and the ability to play a few more MAME games? Nah, not worth the headache. For now.
So I started with some old old incredibly old-school stuff. Cue Atari 2600 stage left.
I never had a atari, only even got to play River Raid once...
Took a bit to get the z26 emulator going fullscreen, but it was worth it. Nice simple program thankyou, no bloatware here.
After stuffing around with the 2nd gen consoles (I worked everything into console generations, based on Wikipedia's articles) I moved on to a console that I always wanted but never got: The SNES. Easy as all hell with zSNES!
Yeah, SimCity was my year 7 lunchtime break on ancient 286's - featured here on zSNES
(sidenote: Anyone else remember the original CD's you got at school? Came in a jewel case with a metal slot just like a 3"1/4 floppy?.. no? damn. What about running Windows 3.1 on a school network and being able to get the server to crash by opening the same file on 30 computers at once?)
Mamewah worked perfectly for linking these in, and a fine list more.
At this point, I had 2GB ram in the box - im tempted to swap it out with a 1gb or a 512 from the fileserver. Or perhaps with onboard video hoggin up all the space its worth leavin a lot free.
Also here I had a 120GB IDE HDD... Plenty until I thought of adding a jukebox program and media playback capabilities.
Which leads me neatly onto me getting bored of installing emulators and hence a jukebox:
Mmm Quake 2 soundtrack
Jukebox 'emulator' courtesy of DWJuke. What a fantastic little program for the project. Its a good argument to attempt to fit a small ex-computer speaker subwoofer I have sitting here in the case.
With some Quake2 OST blaring, I took it one step further, and worked out how I could get DOS games running with DOSbox on mamewah.
Terry Pratchett said it best: "Eat leaden death, demon..."
Come get some!
WOLF3d! Chuck bucket from the awesome psuedo 3-d graphics optional.
All was right in my world, so i lost a few days just playing the damn thing. A week, actually.
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