I love seeing people making retro gaming consoles in today's modern era of teraflops and Blu-ray discs. It's one of the reasons I enjoyed covering the GameTank, a new 8-bit console with its own games and OS in 2026 - what's not to love?
A modder called Emmet has made their own DIY game console that uses old-fashioned CDs to play games. The console, which was covered in a post by Hackaday, has an Intel N150 on a single-board computer. It's running Batocera, which is the Linux retro gaming operating system that I covered when testing out the Helegaly Action π. It's a brilliant OS that has a great user experience and copes with all of your retro games perfectly, a perfect choice for the games that Emmet is loading up onto this thing.
According to Emmet, the optical discs hold the ROM files for each game along with the specific shell script to put them in their respective place inside Batocera's library. He's made 3D-printed cases and everything, as well as box art and labels, meaning he can load up a CD with Pokémon Emerald on it, hook up a wireless gamepad of his own design, and game in an old-school way like we would have done with chipped PS1 discs back in the day!
I know that this might seem like a bit of a long-winded way around playing ROMs to you, but for those of us who grew up slotting Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires into our PC, and then slotting in discs in the PS1, this feels like a blast from the past. It takes me back to the days of downloading games and music off torrents on the internet that took an age to arrive, and trading chipped discs with friends after modding our PS1s.
I guess Emmet's project will appeal to gamers like me more than those who have grown up with the PS5, but that's ok. It's nice to see rewritable CDs making a bit of a comeback - nostalgia makes the world go round. In fact, people will be recording games off of radio frequencies again before we know it!
