Is retro computing cool enough for Cyber Cafés?

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That's is a really cool idea, but you would probably get more milage with Emulators... Since the retro machines are going to need software, most of which is under copyright and would have to be loaded from floppy and in some cases tape!

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motorollin wrote:
I don't care who knows I'm a geek, so I would definitely play retro games in a web café if I were there. There are things you can do to get around the problems of media in retro consoles (like a hard drive in an Amiga or MMC64/IDE64 on a C64). But this won't help for consoles like SNES (assuming you wanted to use them). One alternative would be to have a the retro machine on display with the machine running the emulator hidden, and use original controllers with USB adapters connected to the PC. That way if you rig it up cleverly it might look like the player is using the original machine.

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moto

I think this is the best option, that way you can program a nice front end for the Emulation (This could probably be done using an HTML based interface)... with Game selection, and also a Timeout/credit system so that you don't get someone just sitting there all day... with a cold cup of coffee, playing monkey island. It also preserves very old Hardware from the abuse of 16hours a day 300 days a year will give... As Moto says wit the Emualtion machine hidden well no one would ever know... a suitably powerful PC could proably run all the emulations at the same time (Two C64 and two E-UAE run fine on my MacBook Pro), with a multi-monitor setup... saving quite a bit of money...