Plan: Classic Gaming Station

Astute people will know that I had some plans for my old laptop. The result of that was:

• I put Puppy Linux on it (Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix’s installer had been fixed, but Puppy just seemed like a better choice for my needs).
• I learned that it actually has 128MB of RAM (it just labelled it as two sets of 64MB, which is what confused me the first time).
• In spite of Puppy’s wonderfulness, the wireless card didn’t work (who cares) and neither did the sound card (kind of important for a jukebox). And as delightful as it may be to compose documents in Abiword, I didn’t see much use for that.

So I have a new plan:

I’ll remove Puppy, install FreeDOS, and use that to convert it into a game station for my childhood games (which seem pretty recent to many) : Keen, Crystal Caves, Raptor, Duke Nukem (1 and 2), Jetpack, Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball, Wolfenstein, and many many others (I’ll take anyone on in a LAN race with Wacky Wheels).

I’ll also probably download some more I didn’t know about (there’s a ridiculously large amount of websites hosting them).

I’ll keep you guys posted about how it goes.

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Many thanks to Ronnie Tucker for writing about creating a classic console arcade-computer–it inspired me to get this idea.

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