Monday 27 April 2009

Wahcade Emulator Front-End

Now, you might think I've gone mad putting a link here to Wahcade. Either that or you'll think I've too much time on my hands and spend all my time digging out old games to play on this arcade machine manager. While making an arcade machine, case and all, sounds like a lot of fun (and one day when life is less busy I might just give it a go), I'm really making a note here to flag it as an interesting example of what we might do in reading rooms. I guess it is a bit like those media centre PCs (Mythbuntu for example) or the BL's "Turning the Pages" only this is a front-end for emulators.

Imagine that a collection is a "rom" (the rom being the image of a chip containing, in Wahcade's case, a game but for us could be a disk image from a donor's PC). The user picks from a list of roms and then the reading room "arcade" starts an emulator and away you go. Before you know it the dumb terminal is a replica Mac System 6 desktop complete with donor file system, etc.

Be neat wouldn't it?

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