Turn Your Netbook into a Gaming Powerhouse

This is a Quite Useful guide to netbook gaming.  Something for the weekend!

If you’ve recently bought a netbook, you probably bought it for work.  I see people in cafes with their email client open or a word processor, but never Mario jumping around.

The first thing to realise is netbooks are powerful enough to emulate most of the 8bit and 16bit consoles.  The second is your favourite old PC games will probably run quite well in Windows XP.  The third is if you own an LCD TV,  you can plug it into most netbooks though its VGA port!

Emulation

I’ve tested zsnes, snes9x and fceu on my Dell Inspiron Mini under Linux and they all run well.  I can play NES, SNES and MegaDrive (Genesis) games anywhere now.

In some emulators I had to set the audio to 48000, so look for the audio frequency setting if your sound is weird.  Also, I had to start zsnes with a command line parameter to make it run with sdl audio.  It’ll probably all just work in Windows.

What’s more awesome than this is if you own an LCD TV, it probably has VGA input.  This means you can plug your netbook into the TV.  I set my Sony Bravia to “Full 2” mode on the PC input and zsnes to 800x600, and SNES games look better than ever.

But you’re probably wondering how I can suffer with the netbook’s keyboard for games.  The biggest netbook gaming secret is: use a Wii Remote!  I was able to pair my Wii remote with bluetooth in Ubuntu, but what’s even more amazing is the classic controller works!  That means I can use the remote horizontally for NES games, and classic controller for SNES/MegaDrive.  It’s incredibly good.

Follow this article to get your wii remote runing in Linux: WiiMote on Linux - Install and Config.  To quickly try it in Ubuntu do this:

modeprobe uinput
apt-get install wminput

The article describes how to create profiles to map between the remote and the keyboard.  I had to manually create one for zsnes based on the author’s snes9x example.

To install zsnes and fceu (a NES emulator), you’ll need to enable universe for Dell’s Ubuntu distro.  Go to Administration, Software Sources.  If you want to download debs, Firefox wil prompt you to install them with a GUI installer so it’s pretty easy.  Just look for emulators released for hardy — that’s what Dell installs by standard in the Inspiron Mini: zsnes hardy package.  And try out MAME while you’re at it.

As for Windows, this would be a good starting point: WiinRemote

ScummVM

ScummVM runs classic LucasArts adventure games.  Monkey Island, Indy, Sam and Max and dozens more.  It’ll work well in Windows XP or Linux.  ScummVM works with your original discs, and you can use utilities to extract the content for use on your netbook (or just copy the data files).

Classic PC Games

Diablo II, StarCraft and Fallout will all run acceptably.  Fortunately a lot of these strategy and RGPs work well ehough with the mouse and minimal keyboard input.  Just plug in a USB mouse if the trackpad is too awkward.  I bought Diablo II off Blizzard’s online store to try it, which is a good solution if you don’t still have your copy or can’t find a cheap one on eBay.

Modern Casual PC Games

Peggle, World of Goo and Puzzle Quest are good starting points.  Install Steam and get started in no time.