GP2X handheld Linux games console - A review

For Christmas this year, I managed to persuade my other half that a GP2X would be an ideal present to keep me quiet. For those who don't know, the GP2X is a handheld games console whose main selling point is that it runs Linux behind-the-scenes and has buckets of "homebrew" software, including ports of popular Open-Source games and emulators. As I've stated in a previous article, to me that makes it more valuable than any other games console I've ever owned - I can load it up with "fun" older games and play for thousands of hours rather than spend a fortune on a single modern game which I would play for about a day before I get bored or completed it. (Incidentally, thank you Nintendo for the Wii and bringing the fun back into gaming!)

Anyway, I am now the very proud owner of a "Mark 1" GP2X, called the F-100. This is the black version with the original "joystick" rather than the touchscreen and digital joypad. To be honest, I didn't specify which version and knowing what I know now, I'm glad that all the wife could afford was a second-hand F-100. It's personal choice but I can sacrifice the features of the sucessor F-200 for the features that the earlier model has. Other people would disagree depending on their usage.

Most of the people who are interested in the GP2X, or indeed it's predecessor the GP32, will know about the handheld's features but for a quick rundown...

It runs on two "off-the-shelf" ARM chips (940T and 920T), with variable (and software-controlled) clocking between 60MHz and 260MHz each, the default being 200MHz and the overclocking being quite "safe" overclocking that doesn't cause permanent damage unless you do it for very long periods of time and overheat something. In fact, more powerful games can only run at the higher speeds and will "overclock" the device themselves - all that happens is that it works or it crashes. All that is required to "recover" from a crash is a switch-on, switch-off to get it back to normal.

It comes with 64Mb RAM (32Mb is directly accesible, the rest can be used with some trickery and often is) and a 64Mb internal NAND permanent storage. This contains the bootloader, kernel, some built-in applications like the menu and maybe even some games depending on your particular purchase. This can all be replaced and customised but you won't gain much. The NAND allows people who forgot to get an SD card to use the console straight away, and also provides an avenue for the vendors to pre-load certain games if you buy their bundles. Also, because it has to be a deliberate act to affect the NAND bootloaders or kernel, you aren't going to be bricking your GP2X accidentally. NAND firmware updates tend to come in the form of a bootable SD card.

For main storage, you can use an SD card up to 4Gb (32Gb in the later F-200 model) formatted in either ext2 or FAT32 - most cards come with FAT anyway and if you want to use the connectivity features, you're better off with the more-prevelant FAT. This is where most of your games etc. will go and it's quite easy to have hundreds or thousands of games on a single large SD card. And, let's be honest, SD cards are so tiny that you could easily carry a handful with you and fulfill every gaming need.

The firmware runs uBoot to boot pure Linux 2.4 as the core OS (source and alternative firmwares are available but you don't gain much because GamePark Holdings, the manufacturer, did a good job in the first place) in around ten seconds, with a nice splashscreen and bingely-bingely-beep startup sound. All of the "menus", games, emulators are just ordinary Linux programs compiled on GCC against an ARM target. So everything is either open-source from the start or has many open-source equivalents, even the main menu, boot-up screens, built-in applications etc.

Because it relies on BusyBox internally, it's not even unusual to see wrapper-bash-scripts around games in the Games menu. It has a rather perfect and simplistic method of program execution - when the GP2X starts up, it boots and then runs the menu program (standard Linux binary). That lets you select a game/application to run. On termination, each individual application is responsible for making sure it exec()'s the main menu before it clears up. It's beautifully simple but works and prevents the menu hogging RAM while you're playing a game. And if a program ever crashes really hard, you just switch-off, switch-on and it boots the menu back up again. Programs have full access to NAND and SD storage for savegames etc. but they tend to only place things in their own folders. This does, however, allow you to have a collective "roms" folder and use several different emulators with the same roms.

It operates off two AA batteries, although they HAVE to be high-power rechargeables (preferably 2800mAh) - what do you expect for a dual-200MHz portable machine?! You can get a good couple of hours out of a set of two depending on what you're doing. There is also a mains-adaptor port for static use and you can easily carry enough AA batteries to last you all day if need be. The only minor point here is that the mains adaptor doesn't charge the batteries, but you can't have everything.

The screen is full-colour, 320x240 and is very good in virtually any lighting. It is covered by a plastic protective screen about 2mm above the surface, which protects the expensive bits against that pen you keep in your pocket. There are two speaker grilles on the front (I believe only one is an actual speaker(?) but stereo sound is present in the headphones) and the SD slot sits in the very middle at the top.

It also has a headphone socket, power socket (3.3v regulated), mini-USB socket and EXT socket (we'll get to those last two in a minute). The two AA's sit comfortably in a rear "bump". The game controls are (on the F-100) a "mini-joystick" on the left of the screen which works surprisingly well, A, B, X, Y, Start, Select buttons in their usual places, Vol+ and Vol- just underneath the joystick and L and R shoulder buttons. On the F-100, the joystick also "clicks" down to provide another button. Sadly this was removed from the F-200 model because the joystick was replaced with a 4-way D-pad and a touchscreen was introduced over the LCD.

The GP2X is comfortable to hold for long periods and the design is "flat" on the front, except for the joystick which can be controlled by a wiggly thumb or between two fingers for precision control. The batteries are tucked away from your fingers so it feels quite thin. You can't accidentally eject the SD card or knock the battery cover off while playing and all the other ports have rubber covers to stop you poking things in them accidentally. Headphones plug into the top, keeping the lead out of your way.

The mini-USB socket allows you to connect the supplied USB cable to access the GP2x from a PC - of any kind. No driver software is required and it appears as a standard mass storage device so Linux, Windows and Mac can all "manage" the devices files. Installing a game can literally be a drag-and-drop. You select what content you would like the PC to access each time - either the SD card or (F-100 only) the internal NAND - and it just pops up as a removeable disk.

You can copy your games to your GP2x without switching off by using this feature or you can just eject the SD card and use an SD card reader in your PC (not supplied). There are also a plethora of USB options on the earlier model - the F-100 runs what is known as a USB gadget interface so that it can appear as a "device" to normal PC's. This allows it to be seen as a USB network card, USB HID device (so you can control windows games with its joypad, for example), and it has built-in web server, telnet server and samba server for access over the USB-net. Sadly, these features are lacking from the later model F-200, which I see as a great loss, and were instead replaced with a touchscreen interface in addition to the normal control methods.

Because it's all just Linux, you get some fanatics do things like plug a wireless or Bluetooth USB adaptor into the socket and port a driver for the device. Strangely, they often work, although the practicalities of a handheld limit its usefulness. There are ports of games designed especially for accessing a Nintendo Wiimote over a USB-Bluetooth device, for example.

The EXT socket allows for a whole new range of options. First, TV-out. Yes, this little device can display on your TV! Some games can appear blocky in this mode but some make use of higher resolutions when they detect the TV-out cable. Either way it makes for much better "static" multi-player fun.

Additionally, the F-100 has a peripheral available called the Cradle - essentially a "break-out box" which connects to the EXT port to give you access to 4 USB ports, for connecting devices such as joypads, keyboards, mice, USB keys etc. Games have to support extra controllers but most popular ones do. The GP2x also directly recognises USB mass storage devices connected to it. The breakout box also features TV-out itself too, plus JTAG programming ports (for hard-core tinkering and "un-bricking"), additional audio-out, a power-supply connector and RS232. It's safe to say that the break-out box isn't really that portable because it is intended as a home-device for development, or for using the TV-out feature to turn it into a home console.

But the important thing is, how well does it play games? Well, the absolute best examples for "showing off" don't run to much if you're looking for 3D-power in your handheld, but considering the devices specifications they are very impressive. Payback is a GTA 1/2 clone (some might say a bit TOO close to the original) with 3D, dynamic lighting etc. and plays really well. It has to be said that this is the showpiece of the GP2x and little beats it in terms of hardware use, speed and visuals. On the homebrew side, a complete port (yes, port, not remake) of Quake is the best, in visual terms, that you will see - and it's compatible with virtually every Quake mod, including the official ones. However the little beast should not be underestimated - Quake running at full-speed on a device such as this is no mean feat when there is no dedicated 3D hardware.

The GP2X, it has to be understood, is not going to out-perform much at 3D. It's based firmly on 2D, from design to manufacture to software, and that's where it excels. There are ports of almost every 2D GPL Linux game available - SuperTux, Crimson Fields, LBreakout, Liquid War, GNU Chess, Quake, Hexen, Clonk Planet, etc. there are dozens. But that's NOT what the GP2X is for - I'm sorry but it's not! Neither is it to be used for it's built-in MP3 player, eBook reader or Video player (DivX compatible). Nope. This thing is an emulation machine, pure and simple. The "official" archive is full of games but emulators top the download charts every month.

ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64, Gameboy, NES, SNES, Master System/Game Gear, Genesis/Megadrive, Arcade games, they all have emulators for them that run on the GP2X. Only the most demanding tax the little workhorse but for myself, that was more than enough. I can play all my old favourites, full speed, on a little portable device that I can put in my inside pocket comfortably. This is also the ultimate test of gameplay on the joystick - pulling off Ryu's special moves on a SNES emulator running Street Fighter 2 is flawless (I've heard the F-200 has more trouble because of its D-Pad?). The button layout is very well thought-out and lets you emulate SNES controllers virtually perfectly, and every other comfortably. You never feel that there's a button mapped into an impossible place.

The speed, graphics and sound for the above-mentioned emulators are perfect for the vast majority of games in default settings - it's always those ones with the special chips that give you performance problems. Gameboy games feel perfect, SNES games work perfectly if you have the "basic" chips, so Super Mario World and Mario All-Stars are flawless but things like Street Fighter Alpha, Starfox and Yoshi's Island will suffer. There is a port of MAME available with over a thousand games playable. Most 80's arcade games are fully playable and later ones are hit-and-miss depending on the specifications. I love Final Fight, Wonder Boy, Pang, Ikari Warriors etc. and was very glad to see that they all ran perfectly.

You can stretch the machine to higher-level games (there's even a PSX emulator for the very optimistic) using the built-in overclocking options in most emulators but you rarely go from "Aw, it's unplayable" to "Yay, it's perfect" by doing so. Also, as with all overclocking (of which I am a massive opponent when it is used on PC's), it varies considerably based on the particular manufacturing that went into your particular device. Some people can overclock their GP2X to 270MHz and beyond without problems, others can't get much past the 200MHz defaults. Oh, and it can kill your batteries much more quickly, so in fact what you find yourself doing is finding "sweet-spot" under-clocking limits for every game so that you can save battery power without sacrificing gameplay. Most emulators allow you to do this on a per-game basis, which helps you save as much as possible.

Emulators are definitely leading the software development on the GP2X - RAM timing and MMU hacks to vastly improve performance originated from a want to get every ounce of power out of the GP2X and are present in every emulator and in most homebrew games. MAME lets you access 4 USB joypads connected to the handheld for multiplayer action - a rare feature in other GP2X games, but has been copied into most emulators for the platform. There are a smattering of commercial games, none really priced higher than about £10, and their quality does show through but there are not many able to compete with "free" games coming out of the porting community. I thought that Payback was well-worth the money but I'm not sure I'd fork out for some of the puzzle games. I'd much rather give a homebrew-author the money for a particular favourite.

And with a 2Gb SD card, you can fit almost everything you'd want (including a couple of hundred MP3's and a video or two) onto a single card.

On top of emulation, the homebrew would be the next software "feature". If you can compile against ARM targets (easy with GCC and the various devkits available for the GP2X), base the game off Allegro or SDL or be prepared to write a little hardware-code, you can get games up and running in minutes. The hardware was designed to be accessible - it's all just Linux. You can get the joypad showing up in /dev/joy, you get sound out of /dev/dsp, you can do some memory mapping tricks on /dev/mem and /dev/fb to create double-buffered video in the slightly-trickier top 32Mb of RAM. Everything is just Linux 2.4 with some extra features here and there to let you tweak the LCD backlight, control the battery-low light, speed up either CPU etc.

There are versions of BASIC available which target the GP2x and are designed to create the sort of mini-games that can be more fun than commercial games - sites running nothing but Flash games are proof of this on the Internet, and on the GP2X you can knock up similar games in minutes using one of dozens of development packages - Fenix, Python, BASIC, all sorts of languages are available. There are hundreds of games available, some diabolical, some fantastic. There are even ports of SCUMMVM, Albion, Descent, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Ultima 7, Heretic, Hexen, Rise of the Triad, various DOSBox-based games, Frozen Bubble, Super Mario War, OpenTyrian and even the Graphical version of Nethack! (I'm sorry, you can't leave that game out of the list!). Every year there is a competition run for the best GP2X homebrew or ported game and the winners can be very impressive.

At the moment, when I'm not playing the "oldies" on an emulator, I'm playing Ghostpix (a very polished Picross/Nonogram/whatever you want to call it puzzle-game), SuperTux, Liquid Wars, Kuoles, FreeDroid, Frontier2x (an Elite-2-port), Quake, and a million other "five-minutes" games that are just fantastic for a handheld console.

And the most important thing - the GP2X makes gaming fun again. You plug it into your PC, download some stuff from the web or the official archive, throw it onto the SD card over the USB cable, then go to Games, GameName, GameExecutable and play. You can even use the eBook reader to read the instructions on the device itself (emulators tend to have a lot of instructions because, for instance, SNES emulation demands quite a lot of buttons to be mapped so you need to know how to get back out to the menu - usually this is some combination like Vol+ and Vol- simultaneously or R+L+Start).

A lot of thought obviously went into its design. It's sleek, small, comfy, durable and practical. It has plenty of connectivity and hacking potential (even the F-200). It works well and is sturdy. Controls are obvious (Vol+ and Vol- work in EVERYTHING, just about, even though they are software-controlled) and well thought-out. The built in applications are more than good enough and substitutes are easy to come by - there's even one that makes it look and work like the PSP interface.

It could benefit from an add-on battery pack like the PSP has, especially if you can get several hours out of such a thing, even on the highest demands. And it really needs an in-built charging circuit. But apart from that it's very, very good and it should really get more attention from hardware designers.

For the next model, a "hybrid" of the first and second models would sell much better - sacrificing old functionality for new functionality isn't a good choice to make. If you could upgrade its 3D capabilities without destroying backwards compatibility (the homebrew/porting scene is far too important to just discard and try to build another), that could only be a good thing. I don't see it being impossible, even if it's only in the form of a 3D accelerator chip and a custom OpenGL library to manage it. But on many fronts it's already perfect.

The capabilities are there for networked games (at least in the F-100), but it doesn't appear that many people have used them. Maybe a small wireless or Bluetooth chip could solve that problem in a backward-compatible way (especially with the Wiimote being Bluetooth-based, it looks set to be a standard for wireless games controllers) - it's not like the drivers for such things would be impossible to port. You could easily upgrade to a 2.6 kernel (some people already have!) for the next version and open up a whole new world of new drivers you could take advantage of. You would have to tweak it, though, to ensure power-use stayed as low as possible - embedded kernels aren't exactly rare, though.

But the best thing about the GP2X is the reputation that goes with it. Nobody knows what it is, so you get some strange looks when you produce it from a pocket on the train. Some even stranger ones when someone recognises the Mario "ting" from an obviously non-Nintendo device. It is absolutely fantastic for wiling away long journeys, it has to be said, purely because of its design for a short attention span... listen to some music, read an ebook, play a SNES game, listen some more, play some Megadrive, listen some more, carry on that campaign in Crimson Fields, etc.

All in all, the GP2X has managed to do what a lot of the larger handheld console developers haven't. It turns a profit, based purely on hardware. Software is especially prevelant even though there are few "launch" titles. It's great fun and well designed. And it has a community effect that's unmatched.

Here's to a GP2X sequel that's even better!

Retro-gaming value for money

Take one old PC (considered obsolete by its previous owner and consigned to the scrapheap), add a lashing of a spare operating system (Linux is fine but, in all honesty, Windows is easier for this project). Mix in some random game controllers chosen by lucky dip into your "parts" box (anything from an expensive Playstation joypad with a USB adaptor through to an old two-button gameport joystick is fine). Add a dash of emulators for older games systems that you knew and loved. Sprinkle with a hefty swig of configuration, plugging in and cursing. Decorate with a lashing of ROM downloads of games that you still currently own but can't be bothered to play because the setting up of the games console that runs them takes longer than completing the game.

Finally, download lots of popular freeware games, give them a try-out, then have a retro/freeware-games party with anyone that has a favourite old game they haven't played in years. A TV-out capable card will help matters immensely, allowing you to play them on the telly in the front room, just like the old days. If not, a nice monitor will do just fine. Or for those lucky enough to have a projector, this would be the best way to keep a room full of big-kids happy.

Seriously. I've just done the above with my own ingredients... a 1GHz PC with 512 MB RAM (although you could probably get away with even less). I slapped a spare copy of Windows XP Home on it (I always end up with a little collection of Windows XP licenses from the various computers that I repair or, if they are beyond repair, recycle). I "upgraded" the onboard graphics to an ancient and obsolete AGP 4x card because I wanted TV-Out (the less said about that the better - old TV's that can't display the refresh rates you want without flickering can ruin hours of careful planning and playing with settings).

I threw in a spare 4-port USB card and as many reliable games controllers as I could find. A cheap cable to connect the sound through the television, a few extender cables for the various controllers (because in the heat of a gaming party someone WILL tug on them) and a cordless keyboard/mouse set to control the system from the living room sofa. A little utility called Joy2Key also came to the rescue, especially if you do what I did - I made a tiny Visual Basic util to turn the machine into a primitive "who pressed first" quiz buzzer - more on that later.

The emulators available to such an "obsolete" machine cross all sorts of systems (but only those ones that I ever played on or still have... I have somewhere a CD with Commodore 64 emulators and ROM's but I don't think I've ever even loaded it because I never used to have that particular piece of gaming history, so I have no interest in seeing the games it used to play.) Currently, my particular setup has (in order of age), ZX Spectrum, Sega Master System, Nintendo Gameboy, Sega GameGear, Philips CD-I, Sega Megadrive, Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 emulators, all of which have several popular games (everything from the previously mentioned JetPac through to Super Mario 64) loaded and ready to play, full screen, full speed, on this old relic of a PC. Anything of the Nintendo 64-era or less is fully playable on such a machine, given the right emulators, and more powerful machines will laugh at them.

It even has DOSBox running several old DOS games that I've only just consigned to the "cupboard of slow, ageing death" where games live that are no longer easy enough to play on modern systems but which I still have a fond memory for (Syndicate, Cannon Fodder, Command & Conquer, Settlers etc.)

And it plays them all fantastically. The foresight of using my best two games controllers (a USB PC joypad made to duplicate a Playstation Analog Dual Shock and an actual Dual Shock with a Playstation -> USB convertor) even allows precise analog control of Mario in Mario 64, or while driving in Mario Kart. And with a press of a button and a change of emulator, it's suddenly a Kempston joystick in a ZX Spectrum.

It's been great to play all the classics. JetPac just isn't JetPac unless it's played on a TV and is emulated so accurately that all it's little palette flickers happen just right. And Target Renegade is still a fantastic game for picking up for only a few minutes for a quick bash. Super Mario 3's Battle Game (the version from the SNES remake) is a great party game.

So every game I've ever owned on a games console is now sitting on one easy-to-manage, quick-to-boot, no-fiddling-with-TV-tuning PC with gamepads enough for a four player battle in any emulated system that supported it. When I originally had this system set up, it was on an equivalent laptop and that was even more fun... there's nothing better than being able to whip out your laptop at someone's house and launch into four-player frenzied gaming of some of the classics.

And I also loaded this PC up with some other games that I had lying around or had downloaded previously...

- Slicks 'n' Slides
An old DOS racing game that I was a registered user of, way back when. With a utility like Joy2Key, you can play four-player with ease (beats having to cram four of us around a single keyboard like we did when we used to play this in Maths lessons in school!).

- XQuest 2
A marvellous freeware game that requires precision control of the mouse

- SCUMMVM
An emulator for various point-and-click adventure games, which comes with Beneath A Steel Sky as a freeware game

- OpenTTD
A remake of the classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe

- Abuse-SDL
The dark and fantastic Abuse from Crack dot Com.

- Rocks 'n' Diamonds
Another remake, this time of Rockman.

- PySolitaire
A card-game to wipe the floor with all the rest (but you can still add Solitaire and Hearts to your PC "console" if you want) - hundreds of customisable card games in one program.

- Liquid Wars
A brilliantly original game, part strategy, part fast reactions.

- Battle Painters
A wonderful game to leave the kiddies with - each player has to paint as much of the screen as possible before the timer runs out. I use Joy2Key on this as well, for the same reason as Slicks 'n' Slides, though this is a Windows game.

- Super Mario War
The best Christmas present I ever gave my mum - she is a massive Mario Battle Game fan and this gave us a night full of entertainment. Mario-themed but the number of games alone is enough to keep the most ardent Mario-hater busy. And such four-player mayhem is incomparable.

Not to mention TuxRacer, Pingus, Gate 88 and all those other great freeware or open-source games.

It's the best games console I've ever had. I even ended up naming the PC "CONSOLE" in it's configuration. It doesn't have network or anything else set up - it was worth sacrificing an old PC for and, as far as I'm concerned, the best use of a Windows XP license ever.

I turn it on. Within about 30 seconds it's in Windows (no net = no need for lots of utilities / services that slow it down) and ready to play. That 30 seconds would be taken up by switching to the right SCART socket, untangling the joypads etc. anyway, so you don't even notice it. Then, when you're in, you can play some old ZX Spectrum game while you wait for your loved one to settle down with a controller that they don't mind using, then you can both have a blast on Mario Kart 64 or play some silly freeware game without having to switch machines. When she goes to bed, you can load up a bit of Syndicate or finish off that Red Alert campaign.

You can have "Mario nights"... Start with the original NES versions, then do the Gameboy ones, working your way up to Mario 64 and filling in the time with some Battle Games, a quick blast of Mario Kart or a four-way battle in Super Mario War. And when anyone comes over and says "Do you remember ?", you can just load it up and play it.

It's great and it's the best investment of time I've ever put into a Windows system. I was going to download one of these menu systems that they have for multi-emulator setups but they were all pants and I found that a desktop folder called Games with a shortcut for each machine type is more than good enough. When you have a lot of games on the system, you would spend longer setting up a menu system and then selecting them than you would just loading up an emulator and typing in the name anyway. You can assign shortcut keys to each shortcut and, if you want, use something like Joy2Key to load up particular ones from the joypad!

Joy2Key is a bit of a fiddle but it's only really necessary for comfort on old games or emulators that can't reassign keys to joypads easily. Do it right and you have the "best" joypad be the controller - the one that can pause, open games, exit emulators etc. by pressing the right buttons on it. Or you can just delegate the keyboard to someone who knows the shortcut keys for each emulator.

I found that the Playstation-style joypad controllers were the best to use. Enough buttons for almost any game system (with a few spare for vital functions like Pause etc.), digital and analog controls, cheap, comfortable, easy to get hold of and easy to find adaptors for (in the UK, Game sell them in all their shops). They're also especially close to the original SNES controllers that I end up playing more than other types of games.

The most time-consuming bits were:

- Making it boot fast
Don't install anything that you don't need to (networks etc. included). Clear out all your startup entries. Set all BIOS options etc. to be as quick as possible. Make your desktop as plain as possible and completely empty your system tray. Make sure everything is plugged in each time you use it. You don't care that the system looks ugly, but if it jerks in the middle of a four-player game you'll be regretting putting that large theme on your desktop.

- TV-Out
My own fault really, because I was trying to use what I had to hand. Only when I was several days into getting it to work did I realise that all my problems stemmed from a television that just wouldn't support non-standard refresh rates at all, not even by the slightest degree, but didn't moan about them. I have an external D-Sub -> SCART convertor that just wasn't up to the job of changing refresh rates without having MASSIVE jerkiness (single screen games worked fine but anything that scrolled horizontally or, worse, vertically looked absolutely crap).

So I tried a video card with TV-Out which was perfectly smooth at doing that job, but which had BIG problems with colour display on my TV. Turns out that the old TV just doesn't support colour over a S-Video connector, even if it's connected via SCART. That wasted HOURS of fiddling, soldering, setting-tweaking etc. and on any other TV it just worked fine... so I used a different TV. My next step will be to get a nice flatscreen for it. The most important thing is that everyone can see it, so a small flatscreen with a limited viewing angle is a no-no unless you have some kind of dual-head setup and run one screen for each "team". (P.S. A very brief experiment showed conclusively that playing Jetpac on a 10-foot-wide projector image connected over S-Video is the coolest thing ever, but a very expensive way to run a games machine, so it's just not practical).

- Emulator configuration
Every one had it's own idea of what was Joypad 1. Every one had a different set of buttons on it's emulated controllers. Quite a lot have some weird options or programming that make them totally unsuited to the task. Some quit out if you pressed the same button on the joypad as selected the menu too many times (highly annoying when in the middle of a game). I had Gameboy emulators that couldn't emulate 4-colour Tetris as fast as a Nintendo 64 emulator could emulate Mario 64 on the same setup. I had Megadrive emulators that ALWAYS tore the screen no matter what VSync/Resolution/Buffering/Refresh options you chose. I had a CD-I emulator that will only accept mouse input. I had DOS emulators that needed settings tweaked for each and every game to get the best out of them (and even then at least one of them needed Joy2Key to make it easily playable). ZX Spectrum emulators offer emulations of so many different types of joystick (some of which conflict) that it's a pain to configure them all. Some I fixed, some I persevered and did it the hard way, some I ditched and replaced with other emulators, some I set up with certain limits (i.e. no more than four players, etc.)

- Distractions
Every time you set up an emulator, you just HAVE to test the games several times to make sure that they are all right, don't you?

- Programming
Yep... I did a bit of programming. It's a party machine, it's obvious from the outset. This thing is great at parties. And the best bit is, it's multipurpose. The hardest thing in the world to get is a decent Quiz Buzzer - one of those "who buzzed first" things. So I wrote one. I misused Joy2Key so that any button on the first joypad "typed" a 1 on the keyboard, second joypad 2 etc. and then I wrote a small VB program that just waited for input after the quizmaster had "opened the question" and then whatever character was typed first was declared the winner. It probably wasn't perfectly accurate but it did the job and took about twenty lines of BASIC code and a freeware Joy2Key to do it.

It's a good project to do. It requires limited resources compared to other PC projects (office and schools are throwing out PC's that can do this, TV's are perfect for playing old games on because you don't need the high-resolution of a monitor, any gamepad or joystick will work etc.). It is immensely fun and can be as simple or as complex as you like. It brings people together.

And I guarantee you that, if you are of the age that you can remember playing these sorts of consoles and not just Playstations, you will get ten times more play out of it than spending the equivalent amount of money on the newest games console. For the price of a new games console and a single game you can have every game you've ever played on in full better-than-the-original glory.