Hello all,

I have some very basic experience with emulators from years back. My cousin is in the army in Iraq doing some really cool work training female Iraqis to be police officers. I want to send her something fun for Christmas, and had an idea to make a self-contained CD or USB key with as many classic games as I can fit on it.

I would like it to be very foolproof, with little to no installation required and very little in the way of system requirements. They have pretty regular access to PCs, but their time is limited so it's important that she can pop it in and quickly play a game.

Ideally I'd like a custom front-end to allow her to select from a list of games on multiple platforms. I might send (along with the disk) a USB controller or two, so she doesn't have to use the keyboard.

I'm just looking for any suggestions. Or if something like this already exists, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. My backup plan would be sending one of those 50-in-one boxes that you hook straight up to a TV, but I'd prefer not to go that route.

Thanks!
Domino

Well, as far as speed/compatiblity for emulators, for WindowsXP based PC's I'd suggest:

SNES - ZSNES
Genesis - Kega Fusion
Gameboy/Gameboy Advance - VBAdvance
NES - NEStopia

You could try MAME for arcade games, but it's system requirements greatly vary. A lot of the older games that didn't have digital sound and used analog circuits take a MASSIVE amount of processing power (ie, Asteriods or Donkey Kong for example) while something like PacMan should run fine. I wouldn't expect games post 1990 to run well if it's an older PC. Hell, even some complex mid-80's games could stress an older PC.

Hopefully they have at least 2.4ghz P4's for the military. Being that such machines were built over 5 years ago-ish, I would assume they do.

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Flash drive would be best. It would be able to save games / battery backup and it will be easier for you to configure. I'd suggest sending her a gamepad (if you have a spare PSX pad or two, you could buy a PS->PC USB adapter. I have an EMS-USB2 that does that. Only problem with it is that if you don't have two controllers plugged in, the 2nd port goes hay-wire with random inputs).

To simplify things, I'd configure all of the emulators for the USB drive to use a standard res like 1024x768, and setup the gamepad. However, depending on drive letters and the drivers for a pad, she may have to do some setup stuff.

As for frontends, I'm no help there. I use each emu individually.

Get a used original XBox, soft mod it (easy as pie), and you will give her the easiest and prettiest emulation machine she will ever know. She can also use it for music and video.

If you have some expendable cash then buy a used PSP and mod that as well. That's the ultimate in easy access emulation. You don't need a PC, you don't need to worry about whether or not the package you built will work on her PC and adding new games is as easy as plugging the PSP into a PC. I play games on the train all the time.

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