It all started with me realizing that my original xbox was sitting collecting dust in my parents basement.
I grabbed it and blew the dust off and then began the hunt for my old matrix mod chip that I had boxed up years ago.
I ended up getting all of my boxes from my parents and realized I had collected alot of crap over the years. I went through EVER BOX and never found the chip. I decided to dump out a box of computer cables and there it was in the bottom of the box.
I installed it and set the xbox up then started loading it with my games. I would test the games on my laptop first to make sure they worked and I had all the needed files. I shot to eBAY and bought 2 pelican arcade sticks for xbox and started to fire up some of the games...
Little did I realize that MAME for the xbox is massively outdated and won't run any of the newer games I was aiming for. And the system is too slow for the 3D games...
Plan B: Set up an old pc to run MAME. I grabbed my wife's old amd system that was sitting in the closet and hooked it up to the network and started loading it. I fought with it for about 4 days working on it before and after work and got it to run everything decently (eventually)and was working on configuring the inputs when I realized it was an AMD athelon xp 2200 (1.8ghz) and that I had another spare machine that was a P4 2.56ghz with a nVidia 6800GT.
I booted it up intending to test to see how much faster it actually performed and found that the AGP slot had died so the computer was useless. However I swiped the 6800GT and popped into the AMD system.
Meanwhile the AMD pc that was working heard me bad mouthing how slow it was and decided it needed to run slower and now will reboot whenever I launch a 3d game. I think the video card I transplanted into it might be too powerful for the power supply but at this time I was hungry and felt a dinner break was needed.
Lamenting that I wish all the spare pcs were faster or at least could be cannibalized to make a faster one I realized that my parents had a dual core pentium sitting at their house not being used!
Tomorrow the wife will retreive it and I shall appropriate it for plan C.
