Selfboot emulator CD

[123soleil]

Hi,

Does anyone know if there are any selfbooting emulator CDs? The idea would be to have a CD that boots directly to a menu screen (no "windows"-type GUI but a menu) with all the possible emulators. Once the emu is launched, you can choose the roms.

The goal would be to by a very cheap laptop that is sold without a harddrive and to use only the CDrom and have a custom gaming machine.

Thanks

[Pulsar_t]

You mean an EeePC? I suppose it's possible, but most emulators are written for Windows. You could convince a Linux guru to create a distro that launches Wine with a custom menu for various emulators, but all Linux-heads I know wouldn't bother. It's far less troublesome just to get one of those new EeePCs with WinXP SP3.

[123soleil]

That's not exactly what I had in mind.

The problem with getting an eepc and booting windows, is that you have to boot windows, and then launch the emu. It would be nicer to have a dedicated sytem without a full OS

Anyway I was thinking of an even cheaper alternative. You can find an old laptop (pentium or pentium2 would be more than enough) with or without a hard drive in working condition for maybe 100bucks, sometimes even less. these computers provide enough power to emulate basically any 8 or 16bit system and can boot from the CD. Now there are emulators that do not need a windows-type GUI to launch (unfortunately they are usually outdated versions but provide all the basic emulation). These emus run either in linux console mode or under DOS.

I'm no linux expert, but I know DOS quite well and it's very easy to program a small interface that loads directly instead of the command prompt. I'm sure it is very easy to make a self booting cd using FreeDOS and putting in a bunch of emus and roms. My question was, does this already exist?

[Pulsar_t]

Most DOS emulators are outdated, and even MAME requires Win32 libraries, and I doubt FreeDOS offers all the low-level stuff a VESA driver does for instance. But if you're content with them you can learn to write batch scripts but they're no walk in the park especially if you haven't written code before. Again most people will likely not take this up.

[t0yrobo]

I'm pretty certain it would be possible to make a linux live cd with the required files to do that. The problem is it would take a pretty long time to load and I don't know how well it would actually perform.

[profshiny]

I haven't tried it myself, but KnoppixMAME looks to be pretty similar to what you're trying to accomplish.

[lisalover1]

I tried making a linux distro once like that. No GUI, and removing every unnecessary package and installing CLI-using emulators, and only starting up a readme file with all the commands for it to run games and emulators. I was about 75% done with the project before it got too frustrating and I stopped working on it.