So, as you've probably seen in some of the photos I've been posting lately, the eMachines Box finally has its own setup. I already had the PS/2 keyboard that went to this machine, and I bought a cheap wired mouse from work partially because I needed another mouse, partially because I needed a spare even after I upgrade this one, and partially because the cheapness of the mouse seems to complement the low-end nature of the eMachines Box anyway. I also needed to get an extra long ethernet cable from work to be able to hook it into the router with the way my desk is set up now —this computer's from 2006, it doesn't have a wi-fi module, and I wouldn't want wi-fi on it anyway.

But it works! I'm actually typing and uploading this post entirely from the eMachines Box. This is a far more comfortable setup than before—no more having to share a keyboard and mouse and thus having to choose between my modern computer and Discord and the eMachines Box being, let's be real, locked off from most of the visible internet, and especially no more having to twist my neck to see the CRT placed way off to the side. I can sit facing the monitor now, and that's just astounding.

I wrote this thing off for gaming before I had upgraded it at all, but I'm learning now it actually can play some of my games really well! Granted, those games are minimum five years prior to when it was manufactured, but the fact that I can buy games off GOG, use the offline installer on XP, and then play those games on this setup with this CRT just like when they came out—that's so juicy. If you're curious, the eMachines Box has an integrated graphics chip called the Radeon Xpress 200, which is based on some of ATI's lower-end cards from 2004 or so. Good for media playback and DVDs and all the things this computer was sold to do, but up-to-date gaming is iffy.

Here's some of what I've tested that does work great though! From least surprising to most surprising:

• DOSBox: 32-bit XP can run some DOS games directly without an issue, but GOG always packages DOS games with DOSBox, and the version you get from the offline installer runs the games great. Must play through Tyrian.
• Doom: Chocolate Doom 3.x just locked up the entire PC, but I fell back to a 2.x version and it runs great. The music is obviously iffy, with either a very quiet OPL emulation or using the built-in XP MIDI stuff (and thus the crappy Wavetable GS Synth). I'll look into switching it out for VirtualMIDISynth, which is what I use on 10 to give myself soundfont support when playing MIDIs.
• Quake: I've been trying out various source ports; DirectQ had some horrific model stretching issues (gigantic piles of flesh! horrific, but not quite conductive to fast-paced action), DirectFitz ran okay, but regularly dropped below 30FPS for some reason, and Mark V, my former go-to anyway, runs great but can only play MP3 soundtracks (which have awful latency and crash the program occasionally) and CD audio directly out of the CD drive on the PC. The CD audio is speedy and stable, though that of course means wear and tear on the drive and my CDs (and I wasn't able to use Daemon Tools to trick it with a bin+cue). I'll just burn some CD-Rs and let the drive work as it will though, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.
• Quake II: Knightmare Quake II has been a really good XP-supporting source port. I still need to tweak it to get it perfectly visually accurate to the vanilla game, but performance is really good. I still need to beat Quake II; maybe this is the ideal opportunity to do it.
• Unreal Tournament 99: New to me! I grabbed the GOTY edition off the Internet Archive (I'll eventually buy my own copy too, no worries), and it installed quick, didn't even need a CD key, and played super slick. I only played one match with bots (because I was exhausted from work yesterday), but it was 60fps the whole time, smooth sailing. I actually really liked some of the maps I was playing, and I have a feeling I'm gonna get really obsessed with this one the more I play it. (I also got another Unreal 1 game going, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, mostly because I have such fond memories of the PS1 version. It makes me giggle, not the least of which because all the voice actors are still the knockoffs from the PS1 version, and hearing such familiar voices talk new lines at me is bizarre. The castles still fuck though. I wonder about streaming it.)
• Half-Life: The big one! I got the WON version and patched it for play on the community-run WON2, which seems to mostly be Counter-Strike 1.5 these days, but there's a few Half-Life deathmatch servers going on at any given time. Got into one with bots and felt all the grease, the grease, of connecting to some server in Europe and having your controls and aim be all funky and delayed because of server latency, like any good Half-Life deathmatch in the Current Year should. It was so good. dcb wants to get set up on WON2 too on his HP Media Center PC so we can hop in servers together sometime. Of course, WON2 also supports all the various Half-Life mods, so y'know, anyone wanna do WON2 Deathmatch Classic or Ricochet? Let me know. mariteaux@somnolescent.net. Let's play together. (All this implies that GoldSrc games as a whole run great on this thing; I'm also looking to give 007: Nightfire a shot, since any third-party Valve tech games make me intensely curious and I could always go for another Bond FPS.)

Obviously, I'd still like to upgrade it, and the PC and the keyboard need a deep clean still (coming from the borb household, are you surprised?), but right now, I just want to spend all day on it. I've come to the realization that a lot of my contrarian nature since my teenager years has come from being deprived of all the cool stuff I want to do (usually due to some combination of being poor and being stuck inside without a car), and every time another domino falls into place, I find myself excited for shit again. I'm just a boy who likes old computers is all, and tinkering with this one, installing Plus! XP on it, using MSN Messenger (Somnolians! hop on more blease), installing a buncha games on it, and eventually getting to those upgrades—more RAM, a proper graphics card, another hard drive, a secondary Vista install—I'm finally getting to indulge. Literally standing at work on the regular now thinking about this goddamn computer, excited to come home to it.

And part of indulging is also realizing that this machine, and everything on it, is both fleeting and also renewable. I was worried about wearing out the CD drive, but it's not a Mac where I can't switch shit out if need or want be. There's a million other CD drives I can put in here if it dies. I have that power now. Hell, if the motherboard dies or something catastrophic, I can just replace it with any number of period-appropriate motherboards and reuse the case and all the components. I want to use it now, not wait until some future date where it's perfect and then worry about it fucking up or needing more repairs. The tech might be subject to entropy, but that doesn't mean that there isn't life after death for it. If anything, that's half the fun.