Game machine

I started working on a console game machine last night. The idea is to outfit an old PC with TV out cards and run XMAME/XMESS.

I started with a stripped Intel board and put a Pentium 233MHz processor on it and 32MB of EDO RAM. I had a couple of hard drives, both Seagate, the 2GB drive was no good, but the 1.2GB worked fine. I managed to dig up all the components for a working system, minus the case. I think I'm going to put the first one in an old SGI Indigo case.

The next problem was that the TV out didn't seem to work, so I ended up grabbing an old monitor that could barely do 640x480, it sucks so bad that graphical boot loader screens look like a Picasso painting. The system booted fine until I ran into another problem, the ISA Ethernet card I was using, which had a Realtek 8019 chip, didn't seem to work. I replaced the card with a 10/100 Compaq NIC and was off to the races.

The next step was setting up an NFS server on my notebook; this was a snap thanks to YaST2's (SuSE) graphical tools - a NFS server in 20 seconds. I would have prefered to use Debian, but my discs are at The Working Centre and I don't have high speed at home. Installation from the NFS server went off with only a minor hitch, without a mouse it was difficult to control what software was being installed because there was no "scroll down" keyboard equivalent - I should have used the txt-network image. I plan on installing Debian anyway, so this may be a moot point. But here's a screen shot of the Mandrake install anyway:



Pictures to follow. Day 1, the project has been a success so far. Minor glitches. I believe the T.V. out problem to be an issue with my T.V. switching box, something to look into later. I definately need more NICs if I'm going to mass produce this thing. I made a brief start into SCSI but decided to leave the SCSI cards out for better use. I also need to gather some metal to refashion the old Indigo box. Work calls so I'll have to get moving for today.

Laptop update

Well, it looks like we might be looking at sending some Dell CPi 300MHz notebooks overseas. They seem to be the least expensive for the power. The only problem seems to be batteries, no one is willing to warranty the batteries to hold a charge.

I've found a local dealer who sells the books for $300CDN. The U.S. dealer we were looking at sells the same notebooks for $190U.S., not much difference in the grand scheme of things, except that I will probably have to do most of the installations myself - a day or two at most!

There is another company I'm looking into that is upgrading their notebooks, we'll see if they can give us a better cost/feature combination.

The Working Centre Linux Project

I've mentioned The Working Centre Linux Project (WCLP) a few times already. For those who've just surfed in from Google or some other portal WCLP is a Debian-based linux distribution we created to make it easy for computer recycling volunteers to install linux on recycled machines.



WCLP can be run on as little as a 486DX66 with 16MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive, and this means a full desktop OS with a few necessary programs: word processing, web browser, etc. Realistically, a decent machine would be a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 1GB+ hard drive.

WCLP takes over any partitions you have and wipes out your whole hard drive. Be aware that if you decide to try out WCLP, it destroys anything that's on your hard drive, so save important data first.

Originally the distribution was designed to be installed over a network from an NFS server. That meant all machines had a network card - which was the case anyway because we wanted to make all machines high-speed internet ready.



The Working Centre also has a number of display showcases of old hardware ranging from punch cards to reels of backup tape and more modern stuff like the ECS K7S5A motherboard.