davetansley

About 13 years ago, I made this fella.

https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg

It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.

It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.

This!

Coding isn’t for everyone, but sometimes you can get involved in a coding project just by contributing good suggestions/bug reports to github.

Be thoughtful about how you report things - if you’re reporting a bug, add as much detail as you can to help the devs recreate it; if you’re suggesting a feature, make a solid case for why the application might benefit from it, think about potential issues it might solve (or cause), consider how you might address users who don’t want that feature (make optional).

It is extremely satisfying to see an issue you’ve reported get fixed or a feature you’ve suggested get implemented. It gives you a stake in the project, something you won’t often get on the corporate-owned platforms.

Like everyone else, I mostly remember being amazed by both the graphics and the price. Nobody I knew had one, except one guy who acquired it using money he’d raised through, shall we say, illicit means. As such, he kept it under his bed all the time in case his parents ever found out and nobody saw it. Come to think of it, he may have been making the whole thing up…

As mentioned elsewhere, this was the first system I was enthusiastic about emulating.