Old School Gaming
The other day I took my newest PC and set it up as a media computer. The computer is not amazing, spec wise, since its a 1.7GHz Celeron w/ 512MB of RAM, but the microATX Intel mobo has onboard USB 2.0 and 100BT ethernet, which is nice. The video card is an ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV I bought from a fellow through eBay. The video card is great, because in addition to providing good 3D, it also has nice 2D abilities, a DVI output, an MPEG decoder for DVD playback, S-Video input and outputs, SPDIF output and two IEEE1394 (Firewire) ports, and it comes with an RF remote control.
The computer has been nice so far for playing music in the living room on my nice speakers, watching videos over the network, and best of all, playing game emulators. I picked up a couple of gamepads that look very much like Playstation controllers at Best Buy that use USB (and are supported by XP’s native joystick controller drivers). These combined with emulators like zSNES for emulating the Super Nintendo, and ePSXe for emulating the Playstation.
Emulation involves replicating in code the hardware environment of a game system. Then, the data on the game cartridge, called the ROM, is downloaded onto a computer, and loaded into the emulator. The game ROM is fully tricked by the emulator software into thinking its running on a real game console, and runs happily. So with one computer, the Nintendo and Super Nintendo game worlds are open to me, as well as Playstation, N64 and literally thousands of arcade games.
Last night, armed with two controllers and an emulator equipped PC in the living room, Dennis and I played quite a rousing game of Super Mario Bros. 3. Good times… Good times… Nostalgia has never been so much fun.
Monday 24 May 2004 | Sam | Misc. Technical
The “remember personal info” doesn’t seem to be remembering me, for one, and for two, this also seems to be some comment spam here….