Putting a Steam Machine in an Atari 2600 Shell

[FFSamurai05]

Hello and thanks for reading and/or replying to this post.

 

I'm interested in taking an Atari 2600 case and putting a steam machine that's capable of playing 8-, 16-, and 32- bit games on it using the internals of an old laptop. Preferably I'd like to go with the classic wooden finish rather than the black case as I think it looks nicer. I was wondering if anyone on here has done something similar and, if so, if you've got any tips or suggestions for how I could proceed in doing this. Additionally if you know of a way to get a similar free program to joy2key that's Linux native that'd be appreciated. Thanks again for reading and have a good one.

[Keatah]

There are several PC-in-a-VCS projects scattered around the web.

[TPA5]

A laptop is a pretty good idea as you won't have to worry about cramming a power supply into it. The actual mod isn't too hard, it's basically just gut the Atari, figure out where your new parts will fit, and carefully dremel out openings for everything. There's an instructable that covers a case mod pretty well: http://www.instructables.com/id/Atari-SX2600-a-fairly-complete-Atari-2600-emulatio/

 

Admittedly that case mod bums me out a little due to the ventilation on top which kills it a little for me but I understand why he had to do it. The cooling in a laptop is already pretty efficient so you will be mostly worried about dremelling out the sides for ventilation as most laptops are designed to vent out the side.

[J.Ivy]

Ive done something akin to this, building a streaming machine/retro game machine. I used a broken Commodore Vic-20 case, fixed it, added a new keyboard and installed a raspberry pi inside it. For 45 bucks you can buy the new raspberry pi, its a 1.2gb 64bit machine, easily able to play games on.

 

[SSG]

Ive done something akin to this, building a streaming machine/retro game machine. I used a broken Commodore Vic-20 case, fixed it, added a new keyboard and installed a raspberry pi inside it. For 45 bucks you can buy the new raspberry pi, its a 1.2gb 64bit machine, easily able to play games on.

 

I was going to do that with my Plus/4 that is broken, but I was gonna write a program to use the original keyboard!

[7800fan]

Go with C16, it uses black shell and looks exactly like Vic20 and C64 otherwise.

[FFSamurai05]

Thank you all very much for the replies. Have you tried running STEAM OS on a Raspberry pi out of curiosity? I've read that it's good for streaming but because of its ARM architecture it's not able to run the OS nor any games from STEAM.

[TPA5]

Thank you all very much for the replies. Have you tried running STEAM OS on a Raspberry pi out of curiosity? I've read that it's good for streaming but because of its ARM architecture it's not able to run the OS nor any games from STEAM.

 

That would be correct, it's designed for an x86/64 platform so ARM is out, along with the games you would like to run. If you're headed down the emulation path than a RasPi with the RetroPie software would work, but to run Steam games you need an x86/64 machine.