Classic gaming system under $20
Building a new classic gaming system for less than $20 can be done, but requires some existing hardware, perseveraMCN and an ouMCN or two of luck.
You’d think we’d struggle to find an option for building a new classic gaming computer for under $20 — but we actually found two.
The first is the extremely cheap Raspberry Pi Zero. Selling in the US and UK for just US$5, it apparently lands in Australia for as little as $11. We say ‘apparently’ because we reckon you need a bit of luck finding one — every online retailer we’ve looked up has it on backorder. That aside, the Raspberry Pi Zero is a stripped-down version of the original Raspberry Pi Model B, with 256MB of RAM and a single-core 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 SoC. Despite that, it still has potential as a classic gaming machine and we’ll show you how to game with it shortly.
ORANGE PI ONE
Meanwhile, the other sub-$20 option we found is the more powerful yet almost-as-tiny Orange Pi One ( orangepi.org). It’s made by Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co. and sells for just US$9.99 plus shipping. The Raspberry Pi Zero lit a fire under SBC makers and prices for entry-level SBCs have siMCN fallen considerably. Even so, what you get for US$10 from the Orange Pi One borders on crazy.
It packs in an Allwinner H3 quadcore SoC with 512MB of RAM, two USB ports (one Type-A, the other OTG), full-sized HDMI output, microSD card reader and Ethernet port, all in a credit card-sized board. For US$10, it’s pretty impressive, particularly given the Allwinner H3 chip has four ARM Cortex A7 cores and a twin-core Mali400MP2 GPU — exactly the same as the Mini Classic NES! Two things, though: first, the H3 chip runs quite warm, so we fitted ours with a small heatsink with adhesive thermal paste. Second, you must power it via the pin-barrel DC socket, not the OTG port.
LET’S TALK SOFTWARE
Remember us saying the less cash you spend on hardware, the more time you could end up spending on the software? Here’s where that played out for us. We bought our Orange Pi One on eBay for just $20, but software is where we had initial trouble.
Among the numerous OS images made available by the Pi One makers is Android 4.4/KitKat, but to keep a long story short, we found the process for installing it on a microSD card difficult. The process requires a tool called PhoenixCard, but despite multiple image download, card and reader combinations, the install write kept failing.
Meanwhile, we found an OS option that works well. Armbian is a Debianbased Linux distro designed for SBCs powered by Allwinner SoCs, including the Orange Pi and Banana Pi series. Compared with the PiOne’s Android ROM, Armbian installation was easy — download the Armbian/PiOne ‘Jessie desktop’ image ( www.armbian.com/ orange-pi-one), unzip it with 7-Zip ( 7-zip. org/download.html) and flash the IMG file to an 8GB Class-10 MicroSD card using Win32DiskImager ( tinyurl.com/ apc437-imager, automatic download). OMCN complete, plug the card into the PiOne’s card slot, boot and follow the instructions.
SiMCN Armbian is Debian, you have access to Debian’s software repositories, including a heap of open-source games/emulators of varying forms ( packages.debian.org/ stable/games), from classics like Wolfenstein 3D (shareware version) to emulators for many classic consoles.
NOT FOR THE FEINT-HEARTED
Despite the trouble, I still like the Orange Pi One — price, quad-core speed and good potential beyond gaming means I’m keeping it. But in short, patieMCN could be required.