Repurposing really old hardware
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Hello all!
Any of you working on repurposing really old hardware for fun things like retro arcade gaming? I'm interested to hear what people are trying to do these days, and how your build performs compared to recent RPi 3 and 4 boards.I just rediscovered an old Dell mini 9 I had kicking around, still in good working condition. That's coming along about 16 years old at this point. 32bit only.
Amazingly, the latest Debian 12 installs just perfectly with LXDE (aside from some fiddling needed to make the non-free wireless drive work). I've been playing with the most recent build of RetroPie there. Took nearly 8hr to compile the default install ... but again, amazingly most things seem to run pretty well. For its vintage, it appears to be just about on par with my older RPi3b+ RetroPie build .... some emulators perform a little better, some worse. Mostly so far all my older ROM sets pulled from the 3b+ run well enough to have fun. What makes this machine really nice is its all-in-one compact size, nice built-in LCD, and good enough performance for a lot of emulator fun. The model I have is the pink color which makes it cute and a novelty for my young girls to play with. For now, I'm just kicking it around with an old/cheap NES style buffalo controller I had which seems good enough for most of what I'm fooling with.
Thanks to the linux, emulationstation, RetroPie, and emulator communities still supporting 32bit. Many projects are moving away from 32bit ... keeping those older build architectures alive makes repurposing good equipment like this a really fun little hobby!
Anyone else have any other interesting projects going on -- repurposing good equipment that would otherwise be relegated to ebay or the landfill?
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