Hello AAC,
Me and my friends are lovers of old vintage games and games consoles, and I love star wars so why not make a project that combines my two joys in life.

Original idea I was going to dismantle games consoles like the SNES, NES, PS1 Atari ect and just simply have all the outputs (video, sound) at the back of the R2D2 and have 5+ consoles all crammed in to the body of my model R2D2 like this guy

http://bdevitis.net/project_portfolio/R2D2.htm

My friend suggested why not BUILD a brand new console that was able to play any game/ cartrige that I choose? is that possible
Appart from building the PCB etc would I need to build my own program to plan these devices? like a new OS that can handle the different games....

basically I'm asking,

1. is it possible
2. what would be easier, merging the consoles or building one from scratch?


Thanks guys

 

I'm fairly certain there are software emulators for all of those OSes, so in theory you might just build a PC inside your enclosure. I'm not really advocating this strategy, just throwing it out there as an alternative. The approach requires you have game ROMs on disk. This throws you into the seedy dark recesses of bootleg software. And in my experience emulation isn't always as perfect as you might like, so before pursuing this strategy I'd make sure I had the emulation and game ROMs I want to run.

 

yeah, check into MAME's (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) can usually be built pretty cheap using off the shelf components.... like this >> http://www.retrothing.com/2008/03/diy-build-a-mam.html

 

Thanks BMorse and wayneh for you ideas, I think I will probably go the emulator route, I quite like the "MAME brain" link, I will probably do this this for some of the very old consoles,
Thanks