Completely hypothetical project thus far, but I've always liked the idea of turning an...

[Patrick Thomas]

Completely hypothetical project thus far, but I've always liked the idea of turning an obsolete pc into my own little "console".
In not the 1st person to have the ideas and others already have their own projects started/released (and I wish them well), but be being the perfectionist/pedantic man that I am, love the idea of using open source ports of previously commercial games and adding things like achievements. An xbox/ps dashboard type front end as well obviously, but in addition to that I'd love to have them just start up if you put them in the pc optical drive at startup, not requiring an installed OS.
There's a particular open source os named aros that would be great as a base for something like that (Ive used it before for other stuff (big fan)). Reasonable support considering it obscurity, very small, has the ability "out of the box" to do these sorts of things very easily,

I personally think it could be a fun project and the the end result is something I'd actually use.
Im not asking in regards to my own version should I ever pull my thumb out (unlikely), but is this something else anyone else could get behind if anyone decided to take a bit of a different twist on their "console in a pc" project?

 

[Sean Christopher Ohman]

well you'd probably end up writing a very nice video driver installation/detection program... you'd probably need it to be on at least a blu-ray disc, that's what i'd set as limit. you'd have i guess pre-compiled kernels depending on nvidia or ati or other (could have auto detect feature)... right? i mean you'd probably want something like that

 

[Patrick Thomas]

If anyone is interested I could make a simple live booting Doom, or Monkey Island or Duke3d, or whatever as as example and to show Im not making this whole "It's quite doable, just needs the dashboard and trophies added into a fork of the source code" (that said, thats the vast, vast majority of the work).

 

[Lonnie Edwards]

I have my pc setup to play every game from NES, SNES, N64, PSX, PS2, Gamecube, Sega, Saturn, Dreamcast, Gameboy, Gamegear, GBA so if you need help let me know

 

[Jozef Kaled]

Good idea, it would be great autodetection software, to read or load any data of the medium that is used (USB, CD, DVD, BLURAY ...) and obviously with the configuration that best suits, although at this point all software that conosco of emulation usually require some type of "adjustments" so that the user, depending on the hardware that supports it, obtain the best experience, in sound, video and controls ....

 

[Jozef Kaled]

The closest thing I saw in reference to your comment was with a RaspberryPi system, where in a software you selected the console with which you wanted to play and immediately came out the list with many games of this console ... it was really amazing!

 

[Juliano Reis]

I thought of doing something like that, but it ended up looking like way too much trouble. To go through it, the fun part would have to be the building. To me, the fun part is playing the games, and I don't need to drown in old PC parts to play my little old games.
If that's your thing, though, then by all means, make it and post pics so we can enjoy your work