Hatta

Obligatory bash.org link.

That's a fantastic solution. 6 $1 1ft extension cords and an $8 power strip from Monoprice beats a $20 Power squid with 5 ports any day.

The Xbox only requires an external remote if you don't mod it. Every original Xbox should be soft modded, there's absolutely no downside whatsoever.

The Logitech 3DO pad that comes with Zhadnost is the best 3 button controller for the 3DO. It's very reminiscent of the Logitech Wingman Thunderpad for the PC. If you can find a boxed copy of Zhadnost, buy it.

Here's some numbers for phone chargers. It's up to 2W. Assuming a draw of 2W for 9 transformers, 24/7/365, that's 158KWh, or $19 at $.12/KWh. Edit: I even have a Kill-A-Watt. Unfortunately I packed all my consoles into boxes already.

Practically nothing. Wall wart transformers do leak a little bit of power, whether they have a device attached to them or not. Plug a wall wart into an outlet and nothing else, and come back later. It will be slightly warm to the touch. But we're talking about less than a Watt here.

Depends. Modded PSP, GBA with a flash cart, laptop with a USB Saturn controller, or Neo Geo Pocket Color.

If you can't tell the difference in an ABX test, then of course you'd enjoy it the same.

I still enjoy tinkering with it, as you can tell from the loose cases on some of the towers. You're right, I don't use everything all the time, but I have space for it all and there's little downside to having it hooked up. I am moving into a smaller place, so I sold some stuff already, and I think there's room for everything else if I'm efficient. Actually doing the move is really going to suck though. BTW, you see the network switch on top of the KVMs behind the joystick. Every one of those computers, except the SE/30s, are hooked up to the network for file transfer. I use mTCP usually. Really convenient to just be able to ftp a game to your 286. Also, these particular KVMs, Belkin Omniview Pro2 support both PS/2 and USB output. So I can run both the old PCs and USB macs on the same KVM. It only supports PS/2 devices at its own console though, I was lucky enough to find an optical PS/2 mouse from Logitech. And you can chain these KVMs too with a 25 pin cable. Pretty nice product, and you can pick them up for $20-30 these days. If it only supported a serial mouse it would be perfect.

Yes, I never thought I'd be solving IRQ conflicts, or freeing conventional memory again. Hell, I'm moving in a couple weeks, so here's a picture of my setup while it's still set up. This is just the KVM table, everything else is in boxes already. The 1000TX on the left isn't connected to the KVM, because it's not VGA. The 2500HD/25 (386) on the right is. From left to right on the floor, there's my 486DX2, P200MMX, P2 based Celeron with Voodoo2 SLI, dual 450mhz PIII IBM, two dual CPU G4 powermacs, one for OS9 one for OSX, and an Athlon 2800XP. There's also a PIII behind the wall on the right in a closet serving as a firewall. There's also a Compaq Portable just off frame to the left, behind the pair of SE/30s.

I miss nothing about CRTs because every display I own, that isn't on a portable, is still a CRT. I'm rocking an NEC FP2141SB on my main computer. An old Dell on my vintage VGA computers. Tandy CM-11 on my Tandy 1000TX. 1081 on my Amiga. The consoles are hooked up to a 32" Sony Wega Trinitron, and I have a widescreen Samsung CRT HDTV(1080i) for TV. CRTs have better contrast, zero lag, and support any resolution without scaling. The only real problem I have with CRTs is that they die eventually. And they cost money to throw away. Most of these monitors cost me less to buy than they will to get rid of.

I use a gravis gamepad pro for games with digital controls. e.g. Commander Keen. And a Thrustmaster "Top Gun" for games that require analog. e.g. Wing Commander. It gets tricky once you get into Windows 95 era games, as a lot of "digital" joysticks that use the game port will not work on DOS. Generally, anything with 2 axes and 4 buttons will work in any DOS game. DOS games that use more buttons are generally coded to specifically support Thrustmaster or CH flight sticks. Any other joystick probably requires Windows 95. If you want to use such a joystick in a DOS game, you'll have to run it in a DOS window underneath 95. I recommend finding a thrift store that prices old joysticks cheaply, and buy a lot of them until you find one you like and works with the games you want to play.

This is why adventure games and turn based strategy are awesome. As long as you can think, you can play.

Back in the late 90s, I refurbished an IBM XT that had been stored in a garage. There was an old wasps nest inside the computer. Still ran fine.

I'll mention that Sega Bass Fishing 2 is much, much harder than Sega Bass Fishing. I've never caught a fish in SBF2.

How do you play them if they are in plastic bins?

Virtualbox does not have guest additions for windows 9x, and it's not officially supported, but you can do it. Windows 9x is officially supported by VMWARE however, which is free in cost. In either case, high resolution and high color video modes are available with the proper video drivers. In either case, you can store the virtual drive(which is just a file) on any storage device that can hold files. If you want to do something tricky, like use your VM to create a bootable Win95 USB stick, you can do that, but you'll have to investigate raw device access. I don't think write cycle performance is as big a deal as people make it out to be. Expecially with 8 gig(which is plenty for Win95) flash drives being a dime a dozen these days. And modern OSs buffer writes in memory anyways. And USB throughput is slow, but so were hard drives of that era. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that though. You could just store the disk image on your main hard disk. If you want to make it portable, you'll have problems as virtual machines require administrator access. One alternative you might investigate is Dosbox, which is an emulator not a VM. It's mainly for running DOS games, but since Win95 is just a DOS program you can install Win95 on it. This you'll be able to run anywhere, but it will be slower than a VM. Probably doesn't matter with todays processors.

Oh no, you really want the real thing. The PC was so far ahead of consoles in that era. Just compare Rogue Squadron between the PC and N64. Crank the resolution up to 1024x768 and use a flight stick. The N64 version is pathetic by comparison. This holds for so many games.

There's a fellow on this thread that says an Apple II can do 1000 digits of pi in under 2 minutes.

The Atari 2600 is powered by a 6507 CPU, which is a 6502 missing one address line. So you could call the 2600 a 7 bit console.

Yes, unfortunately it's not standardized. Becareful which cable you use, as there is 5V on these connectors, and you don't want to fry anything accidentally.

Because spectacular failures make for good stories.

youtube-dl is a fantastic app, supports a lot more than just youtube and is highly configurable. You can match videos by date, video format, title (with regular expressions), pretty much anything you want. Runs anywhere Python does.