Now I don’t have a better term for it but my currently little side project is building a “retro emulation machine”. This consists of a laptop running a load of emulators, plugged into the TV via VGA with joypad as the controller. So what does it consist of:

• Old laptop – 1.7Ghz with 2Gb of RAM, (semi-decent graphics card but it’s not gonna run Crysis) running Windows XP SP2
• GameEx – Main front end
• XBox 360 Wireless Receiver (so I can use my 360 pads with it)
• VGA cable into the telly and sound going out the headphone socket into the Amp

The key thing I’m trying to achieve is get it running so I never need to touch or use the keyboard – all control should be via the joypad; so in many ways it will resemble a console, except a console capable of playing any game, on any of the old 16-bit and 8-bit systems. The systems I want to emulate are most, if not all the main classic systems; SNES, Megadrive, NES, N64, Arcade (MAME), NeoGeo, etc. The software build is done, the machine is up and running I’ve configured it to automatically log on using autologon (from Sys Internals) and GameEx starts automatically. However since loading the machine with most of the emulators I’ve found it increasingly tricky to get everything set up exactly how I want it, especially when it comes to ROM sets and joypad configurations both of which have drained a lot of time.

I’ll cover some of the ups & downs of building this thing, in some more posts. When it’s complete I’ll post all the build details and software I used.