Opera Widget Arcade

After running the computer inside the cabinet for some time, we found that it needed better cooling. Without proper ventilation, the computer could easily make the air too hot inside the closed space. We decided to make two ventilation openings in the back of the cabinet, one near the top and one in the bottom door, so that convection takes care of the cooling. On Friday, Adam removed the back wall of the cabinet and started making the ventilation opening. He drilled four holes where the corners of the opening should be, cut the rectangular hole with the jigsaw, and screwed a grate from a disposable grill on top of the opening. These disposable grills (engangsgrill) are very popular in Norway, complete with carbons in a grate-covered tray and even containing a sheet of paper soaked in combustible liquid.

The controller hardware came with a CD containing ROM images of some arcade games popular in the eighties. These games used to run on very specific hardware, sometimes even built specially for the game, that is, of course, not manufactured anymore. However, those old ROM images can still be run with the help of MAME, an emulator that mimics many entertainment hardware platforms of the past. After installing MAME on the machine, we loaded one of the ROM images and played our very first game of Tetris on the Opera Widget Arcade!

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