It has been many months since my last update, and longer since progress was made, but that changed at the end of last week...
My wife gave me a call saying her work was getting rid of some old computers that were bought as backup servers (which in turn were never brought into use).
She asked if I wanted one, and I said yes. And I now have a somewhat decent machine to call my own. Its a Gateway PIII 1.2 GHz, which isn't the fastest of machines, but not to shabby either... It came with Windows 2000 Server, 256 MB of RAM, and no sound or 3D card.
Being I didn't even have a single login for the Win 2000 Server, I formatted the thing & installed XP Home. I had a copy I bought many years ago for use with Virtual PC, which I haven't run in years. I was unsure if it would transfer without issue, but it did, and I was up and running with XP in a couple of hours...
A good friend gave me a sound card he had from some time back, and it installed with no issues.
I'm stopping off at my storage center in order to pull 2 chips out of a blueberry iMac (remember those?). Those two should be the right kind and should give the machine 1 GIG of RAM...
The only thing I don't currently have a plan for is a 3D card. While not totally necessary, it definitely shouldn't hurt. I'll probably ask the friend who gave me the sound card if he has a 3D card laying around (I would be somewhat surprised if he didn't)...
Also, I did finally put the $25 forward for Maximus Arcade. It may take another day to get the registration code, however.
Ironically I have yet to try to run any ROMs on it, as I've been focused primarily on the overall interface. My biggest struggle has been the screensaver. As I've been trying to get a slightly altered copy of the Arcade84 video (google it) to play as a screensaver. There are, unfortuatnly, not a whole lot of free options when it comes to video playing savers, and I'm going with one I stumbled across a couple years ago... Only problem is it is a bit tepremental. You can seemingly set the settings once, then if you try to alter then the whole thing gets messed up and ceases to function. I may end up having to fork over money just to get a video playing saver that actually works, but I'd rather not...
At any rate, once I start actually trying to run emulators we'll see how it goes...