PcP

[bicostp]

I was wondering...

Has anyone else thought about building a handheld gaming system out of a PC? No, I don't mean "gut a laptop and stuff a ps2 in it", but rather "flip a small laptop's screen around, add a controller, and play Unreal on it". I think this is all possible, if not a pain to do. Would anyone have the guts to try this?

(Please do not go into ROMS and emulation and all that jazz, that's borderline-illegal, and it has been discussed before and locked immediately.)

[jellywerker]

yes, many times.

[Alchemist]

Real helpful.

Your best bet would me micro-itx, obviously. The problem you'll find is that you end up creating a laptop - you need a keyboard and a mouse to run windows/linux really. Also most games are geared to this type of controller setup and (for instance, in the game you mentioned, Unreal) are not well suited to using a joypad.

[gannon]

I'm not sure about playing unreal on it, but I think using a nano itx board, some li-poly batteries, and something like a psone or maybe even a 6.8" lcd would work nicely. You could even strip down a cd drive to put in it, although that'd be a big power drain.

[Unidentified Assilant]

What about a 3" Mini Disc DVD Drive?

[bicostp]

If you're rolling in $$$ then you could always graft a controller to a tablet PC...

[Sparkfist]

You could even strip down a cd drive to put in it, although that'd be a big power drain.

The slim CD/DVD-rom used in laptops are not that much of a drain.

The Mini-ITX motherboard are nice small computers but you do sacrifice things like audio and video as these quality are choosen at the discrestion of the board manufature. You can try to run something like Unreal on it but I dont think the graphics chip would be able to handle that.

[bicostp]

Could save power by replacing the hard drive with a CompactFlash or Microdrive disk drive.

[tom61]

I've already started a project doing a from scratch project of making a PC portable.

Probably will have two projects sharing hardware(at least the screen);

One a small Pentium-level DOS machine for Tyrian 2K (now given away free, BTW) and DOS emus that would cheap for others to follow behind in making one, pending the motherboard I'm getting for $40 is good.

The other a bit larger (about the size of a CD-rom) P3-level Linux machine that would be capable of UT2004, at least in software mode, using an EBX embedded board I have now. Also, this machine would be able to surf the internet wirelessly.

Most of the parts are currently shipping, only thing I need to figure out is batteries. Both systems run of 5Volts, so that's not too much of a trouble to have a battery pack that's interchangable between them.

There's some good ideas in this thread, particularly about the mini-keyboard(which I'm going with).

[bicostp]

For games for the pentium DOS machine: www.the-underdogs.org They have a few SNES roms, and some info on Starfox 2.