Hey there,
a game console with DOS on it has been announced. See the link below:
The case is going to be yellowed, of course. 
Seeing RetroPie, I’m not sure if this thing really has a chance on the market. But the case looks nice!
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They´ll be getting in serious trouble when they get to choose a a name for the mini version of the Macintosh.
Well, their FAQ is funny:
Can’t I just buy a Raspberry Pi, an enclosure, gamepad, keyboard, and mouse, 3D print a faceplate, install Armbian, buy 30+ games, build the source for ARM or install/configure in DOSBox for each and every game, create a menu system with game art, and tell everyone about it at parties?
No.
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McClassic ?
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Oh, this fits in perfectly.
I’ve just said how much I cared about the C64 mini, that this one popped out.
But this one has the nice plus of being yellowed even worse than the ugliest ones I remember.
Obviously I was kidding, I don’t particularly like the case since I find it a litlle bit anonimous (but back then I disliked also the cases of the PCs to which it seems to inspire).
Considering all the pros I haven’t thought of, the fact that it’s portable, has brief times of charging and the HDMI port to connect it to the TV it could be nice. And good luck to the kickstarting team! 
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I don’t know how to feel about all these. They’re cool and all, but…
…I’ll stick to DosBox and emulators. Hell, even RetroPie works worse than an emulator on a PC.
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I disliked them as well back then. That color was just ugly. Nonetheless, I think that case is very suitable for a DOS retro console, as most PC cases were beige back then and became yellow-beige over the years. Only a 5.25" floppy disk drive is missing there.
Though, I am less optimistic in terms of the pre-installed games. It’s unlikely that it will be on a par with my personal collection which I grew up with, as there might not be any SCUMM game on that device, for example. Disney won’t be interested.
Yes, sadly. When it comes to drivers and performance, the PC is still a much better choice for emulation.
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My thoughts exactly.
The one good thing about these kind of devices is that they work out of the box and the games are properly licensed. I mean even with games you might legally own, you may not have the means to convert them for use in an emulator. Who in this forum would be able to scrape some old game from a bunch of 5¼" DOS floppies, a C64 cassette tape, a copy protected 3½" Amiga disk, or an SNES cartridge (without buying a bunch of equipment first)?
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Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but this discussion kind of showed me the importance of the task: create an image of my iBook to run in a VM. I already did some experiments with Qemu a couple months ago, installing a fresh copy of OSX 10.4. To my surprise, Apples update servers were still running, and I was able to fully patch it to 10.4.11.
But I’d rather preserve my actual machine (much like a did with my Amiga hard disk back then). So right now, a disk image is being written to an USB stick (23GB via USB 1, that’ll take a while). Then I can see if it boots up.
Out of genuine curiosity: to what purpose? Does it allow to make a kind of backup of your machine (iBook) so you can emulate that in 20 years from now when the actual HW has been lost/broken/…?
Mostly that. Unlike with a DOS PC, where you can run the old software using Dosbox, there isn’t really a way to run old PowerPC OSX programs, unless you have the actual operating system running on actual PPC hardware or on a PPC emulator, like Qemu.
Since the hardware I have is ca. 15 years old by now, it seems about time to make a duplicate of the system. Not that there is much left on there that I’d miss; that never was a machine for gaming, and all personal stuff has long been copied. But it holds a heavily customized development environment, setup to compile my old pet project. I’m a great fan of code that works across multiple operating systems and CPU architectures, and the more exotic, the better. Ensuring that stuff keeps running on PowerPC (and potentially other big endian chips) gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling 
.
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