My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
If it was mine, I’d set it up to run legacy console emulators for NES, SNES, Sega, etc. Good luck finding ROMs these days though, the big gaming companies keep having such sites shut down ☹️
It’s not nearly as difficult as you think. But I agree in the sense that people should be downloading and archiving roms themselves, to keep the history and heritage alive.
I actually do have a pretty massive local archive, mostly acquired back in the late 2000s through mid 2010s when I worked doing data backups and recovery. Key word being local, Nintendo can sugma…
It’s a must if you have a large console collection and leverage Everdrive-like carts and stuff. I also am super fixated on data curation, so having my own archive is ideal.
I’ve still got my old NES, SNES, N64, etc, but it would be nice to have everything all in one machine