You may have seen the post I made a few weeks ago entitled “From E-Waste to Emulation“, which talked about how I bought a really cheap used Windows 8 Lenovo G505 laptop and made it eminently usable for playing retro video games. I bought that laptop on purpose because nobody wants these things, and they’re either going into the garbage or being sold for very cheap prices. You may be wondering (and I would bet money that you aren’t) what became of that old Acer laptop that had the dying, faulty keyboard and non-functional optical drive.
Well, I’m glad you asked.
I had been running a version of Lubuntu on that Acer laptop for 13 years. It originally served as my music editing PC, and to accomplish that I ran CoolEdit on a virtual Windows XP installation. I also made a Windows 98 installation in VirtualBox, into which I installed a whole slew of PC games and other late ’90s era software. I talked about that here and here. And I actually came to use that regularly every day, so the Acer laptop essentially became my Windows 98 machine.
But with the keyboard failing, I couldn’t use it for audio editing any more, and even some of the PC games on it were just a chore to play without properly functioning keys. So out it went. But I came back to it after setting up the “new” laptop, and I decided to try repurposing the Acer laptop into a retro gaming emulation machine too.
The results were really impressive and surprising to me. It turns out that installing only Windows 7 Home Premium on that thing, like it originally came installed with, makes that little laptop happy and comfortable. I had actually tried installing Windows 8, Windows 7 Professional, and another Linux distro on there. Every single OS that wasn’t Windows 7 Home Premium just didn’t mesh well with what I presume are the UEFI settings. But for the first time since I’d had that thing, it powered off and back on properly without having to be force shut-down and rebooted.
That issue sorted out, I began customizing and taming Windows 7, and installing emulators onto it. I can’t recommend OpenShell enough, and it even makes Windows 7 a more pleasant and customizable experience. The emulators I installed pretty much match my choices for the Windows 8.1 laptop that became something really great to play games on. But I was actually more successful in getting systems like TurboGrafx-CD, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, PSP, and Nintendo DS to run properly. Part of that is due to what I think are bad drivers for the low-powered AMD Radeon HD 8210 in that Lenovo. It just can’t seem to handle OpenGL very well. And part of that success on the Acer laptop was based on the fact that I finally found free and effective disc image mounting software for Windows 7 and above.
That software is called Virtual CloneDrive, and you can get it here. It solved the problem I had with the MagicEngine and SSF emulators needing disc images mounted to a SCSI optical disc drive in order to work. Now I can play my collection of TurboGrafx-CD and Sega Saturn games on the old Acer laptop.
The Acer also handles Dreamcast, PSP, and Nintendo DS games properly, so I can get my fill of those ones too. I don’t need to worry about the failing keyboard because I use a Logitech controller to play those games, and I never need the dead optical drive for anything.
So my Acer laptop lives on, now repurposed from a music editing PC into a retro-gaming machine. I like being able to save and continue using old computers like this. It cuts down on e-waste and eliminates the need to save up and buy a new computer.
So as I frequently say, let’s get that 2nd of the 3 “R”s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) in action… Reuse! Get an old computer back into action today. And don’t hesitate, Emulate!