Well, here’s yet another year-old thread I’m resurrecting due to my newly-found member status! 🙂 It’s cool that this thread is here because a group of friends and I were talking about building some old computers to tackle our favorite games as they were “meant to be played.”
This also got the gears turning in my head for the creation of the SierraBox! Basically, a tweaked 486 or early Pentium with enough hard drive space to store ALL the Sierra games with a nice interface to access them all upon startup. Maybe even put the pic of HalfDome in the little square where the computer company’s logo goes. 🙂
This got me thinking even more, living in an “attractions” town such as Orlando, to open a Sierra Cafe of sorts… have these computers all around like an internet cafe, serve food themed to each adventure (Daventry-style mutton chops or an Astro Chicken Sandwich anyone?), and even have the option of people keeping their save-game disks on file at the restaurant, like some places do with personal beer steins! They already have a Pac-Man Cafe here which is very successful… but of course, many more people have played Pac-Man…
I found a good (but sad) source for old computers to be dumpsters. I live near the college, so when it comes time for everyone to move out, it’s like a goldmine! I found three computers in a single day… all P2’s or below… and the only problems with them were that the user managed to muck up Windows 95 to the point of it not booting up anymore. So I wiped the hard drives clean, wiped the grunge off of the cases, blew out the dust, and sold them to friends to use as Linux boxes!! 🙂
Tom.