The Computer... ARGGHHHH (this is a bit ranty)

Really a MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) Arcade is just a fancy computer that runs software that makes it look like an arcade and runs all the games off of hard drive images. The computer doesn't have to be very powerful since it's running games that are mostly over a decade old.

I have two old Pentium computers to work with, an old machine my parents didn't want anymore when the upgraded their computer, and another machine from my old apartment in Grandville. I was originally working on my parents old computer months ago, I had a lot of the emulation software installed and working, but then it started acting up and resetting itself for no reason. So I decided to stop messing with it and just use the other computer. I hadn't started working on it yet though since I started doing other stuff on the arcade.

I have the whole day before Christmas Eve off so I figured it wouldn't be a problem to get everything up and running... Turns out I was wrong. This computer has an onboard graphics card and it is really outdated and the emulator software will not work with it. My first solution was to take the graphics card out of the other computer but after doing that I found out it is a PCI Express card and this computer only has standard PCI, so it won't fit.

So then I spent the next 2 hours driving around to stores on the day before Christmas Eve looking for a PCI graphics card... it wasn't a lot of fun. Not only were all the stores really busy with people doing their last minute shopping but also none of them had what I was looking for. Best Buy only has PCI Express and AGP cards, and the cheapest one was $50 anyway. Seriously if had the luxary of ordering this from eBay and waiting for it to be shipped I could get a $10 card shipped to my door. I call my wife Kristin to see if she has any ideas and she suggests a little computer shop called Computer's Plus near her work. Thankfully they were open and they did have a PCI Graphics card. At that point I was happy to pay $23 for it.

So I got back home and expected to spend 5 minutes installing this card and then getting on with configuring the computer... Of course it couldn't be that simple. Everytime I put the graphics card in the computer won't boot, the fan comes on but that is it, it just sits there whirring away. I disable the existing video drivers and try again and the same thing happens. There is no way to disable to onboard video in the BIOS and I can't find any documention for jumper settings for the motherboard. I start looking around on the internet and apparently this is a common problem with these older EMachines, but even though lot of people seem to have the same problem, nobody has a solution.

After 3 hours I admit defeat. It is now 9:30pm on the day before Christmas Eve and I'm extremely frustrated. I will have limited time to work on it tomorrow since I have to work during the day and then have a family Christmas party at night on my wifes side. I go down and clear my head doing some miscelanious work on the arcade.

I only have one solution... the other computer. I pull the computer back out, put the graphics card back into it, and pull the hard drive out of the other computer and install it. I do some tinkering with the computer and make a few changes here and there, then start getting the emulators set up.

I work on the computer until about 2am and don't have any issues with it restarting, it seems to be fixed but I put all the information on the external hard drive so it shouldn't be too hard to swap it to another computer if there are problems later on.

At this point I have it mostly set up, I think two or three hours work tomorrow night and I should be playing arcade games...

whew...