The Mac Mini, in classic Apple fashion, was just way too much money and got the axe right away. (Prices, where relevant, represent the respective machine’s base starting price.) Apple Mac Mini – $599 Anything more would be icing on the cake. Secretly, I hoped the machine could also emulate Capcom’s CPS3 hardware (Street Fighter 3) and Playstation 1 games. I figured if the machine could at least reach these benchmarks, it would have no problem emulating Gameboy, NES, Genesis, and SNES. I’m a fighting game fan and I really wanted a machine capable of emulating at least Capcom’s CPS2 arcade hardware (Street Fighter Alpha 1-3, Darkstalkers, etc) and the Neo Geo. Powerful enough to run at least CPS2/Neo Geo Video Game Emulators I didn’t want a huge megabeast-of-a-machine the size of a 1999 Compaq PC. This thing had to look nice and fit nicely under the TV somewhere. So it had to eat up as few watts as possible but still deliver amazing performance.

I wanted a box I could potentially leave on all day in case I decided to turn it into a media server down the road. It’s 2010, a space odyssey, mang…If your hardware isn’t sporting HDMI out, you’re still throwing bones at the black monolith, word to Stanley Kubrick. This machine’s primary purpose was to play HD movies on my HDTV. I’ve been eyeing this mini-HTPC market for about a year on-and-off and felt the machines were at a level capable of handling what I wanted at a price comparable if not below a PS3 or Xbox 360.Ĭapable of playing HD 1080P MKV’s and Bluray rips, no sweat I wasn’t interested in putting too much money into this thing. So how did I do it? Peep game: The PrerequisitesĪffordable if not outright cheap (Sub-$400) Over the holiday I set out to create a small, energy-efficient home theater PC (HTPC) that would sit diminutively under the TV and play all of my HD movies, music and video game emulators.

Mac mini emulator box