My GameCentre

I made the perfect retro video game system. It plays all the games I want, even as recent as Gamecube and Wii games. What I love most about it is that I completed anything at all.

It’s a Lenovo ThinkCentre PC, an old LCD monitor, and a Super Nintendo-style wired controller. That’s it.

Originally I planned to make something much more complicated. It was supposed to be a home media center for my living room television. In addition to playing retro video games, it would play movies, music, and stream whatever else. I wanted it to upscale the games to HD somehow, and I’d get a fancy graphics card with an HDMI port, and on and on.

That wish list might sound fine for a lot of people, but for me that’s a recipe for disaster. It’s just too open-ended, too slippery in its definition of done. If I’m honest – and honest with myself – it would never happen.

This is a pattern with me. I’ve been working on the side to build and release independent mobile applications for 14 years. In that time, I’ve released only three applications, and none in the last ten years. There’s a folder on my computer named “Old Projects” that is a boneyard of abandoned software projects.

Normally, projects go like this: I start strong and make a proof-of-concept in a short amount of time (like a weekend). Then I go back-and-forth about critical details indefinitely. Eventually I abandon the project because I can’t justify the ongoing time and energy.

I was in the proof-of-concept phase of the home media center project. I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a 7th generation Intel processor from a guy on OfferUp for the fabulous price of $70. Then I bought an SN30 Pro wired controller from 8BitDo.

I wasn’t sure what software I needed to tie the media center stuff together, but I wanted to try the Lakka operating system. I loaded it up with some games, just to see how well the computer performed as-is. It played Nintendo 64 games perfectly, and both Gamecube and Wii games quite well.

That was all I needed on the gaming front. But I still needed a graphics card to add an HDMI port to the ThinkCentre and connect it to my television.

This is the point where projects of mine go off the rails. I had a good-sounding reason to make changes and buy more stuff – ignoring that the purchase might be its own quagmire and still not get me to the final product.

I was saved by serendipity.

My mother-in-law asked me to recover some personal files from a couple old computers she found in her basement. Along with the computers, she gave me an LCD monitor. Which was great because those computers only had VGA output, and I didn’t have any displays that could connect with VGA.

I set up one of the computers, but I couldn’t get it to power on or display anything. To make sure there wasn’t something wrong with the monitor, I plugged it into the ThinkCentre and, holy crap, it was beautiful!

The display has a 5:4 aspect ratio, which is close to the 4:3 aspect ratio of traditional tube TVs, and it has a resolution that is high, but still below high definition (at 1280 x 1024). This makes games look very crisp without the distortion that normally comes with viewing lower resolution media on a higher-resolution displays.

It was game over the moment I plugged in that monitor. This project was done! Even though I planned to use the ThinkCentre for a bunch of other things, nothing would be as good as what I had on my desk at that moment. With a beautiful LCD monitor, built-in speakers, and enough computing power to play any game I wanted. I had a complete system.

I love that the computer’s capabilities are severely restricted. It’s an appliance, and I can’t fiddle with it too much. I don’t think about all the things it doesn’t do, or all the things it could do. I just play.

I’ve played a lot of these games in different formats; on original hardware, on the Wii Virtual Console, migrated to the Wii U, through Nintendo Switch Online, and even with a Raspberry Pi.

These games are important to me. I always want access to games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, and more. I play them from start to finish every couple of years. To borrow a phrase from my local radio station, these games are “the soundtrack of my life”.

Since my video game playing is measured in decades, I don’t want to mess around with what service or system has which games, when, and for how much.

Now I have a long-term solution for my nostalgic gaming needs with my GameCentre, and one day it’s coming to the nursing home with me. It doesn’t get any better than that.