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I'm sure it's going to end up being bad, but I'll give it a shot:

First of all, no case. It'll work without one, so I'm not including it in my attempt. Given this, along with the fact that I'm using old, slow and therefore cooler processors, no cooling should be needed.

Second, I'm ignoring labor. If you can put Linux on your machine yourself, you can build it yourself.

Cheapest new CPU I could find was a PII-266 for $6:

Compatible motherboard Intel 440BX for $10

Lets go with a good 64MB of ram. This one uses EDO, which is $8.
Then we add a a 4MB AGP video card for $6,
a sound card for $6,
and a 10/100 LAN card for $4.
Power supply for $14.
8x CDROM drive for $9,

At this point, I might add that all of these things actually have free shipping in case you want to do this.

With the exception of power supplies, which are cheap, harddrives go bad the fastest, so people are always buying up the surplus ones. It makes it a lot harder to find old stock that hasn't been sold.

So I'd like to consider it separately. Right now we're at $63.

The cheapest harddrive I could find in 4 minutes of searching (about that for the other stuff) was a 20GB 7200 drive for $30 with shipping.

So...we're done at $93.
You might also have to buy an IDE cable. I was just hoping that the harddrive or the motherboard or the CDRom drive came with one.

Using this same procedure, you can probably get a case for about $20. Same low quality. But why bother with such cheap parts? Keep 'em in a shoebox.

I'm a Nintendo advocate so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

There are 1GB flash cards available but I don't think that just because the technology exists that Nintendo should use it. It would simply be cost prohibitive.

Granted these "new" MC 1019 cards are 8MB which is the same as both the PS2 and Xbox standard cards, 8MB goes a lot farther on the GC. Why? Simply because developers should be used to not having scads of save RAM to use.

There are other reasons of course. The PS2 MC interface has at least one 3D model associated with each game. This model (and it's associated textures and other data) can be animated to even perform secondary animations when the save file is deleted. Talk about your waste of space. I seem to remember "Ridge Racer V" using close to 600k of space which would be bigger than an entire Nintendo MC 59 simply to store configuration data and high scores. Contrast this to several GC games ("Metroid Prime" being a fine example) that use 1 block to store 3 save files. I don't even want to talk about the Xbox "bloat saves" that can't even be copied to a memory card.

FYI, 1 block is 8kB just like the original 15 block PlayStation memory cards. Sony's list price is still $20 for those. Should we all scream foul?

Yes, Nintendo makes money off of memory cards and if you would've brought up the "incompatible" SD Card adapter then you would've had a point. But really, when the prices drop, and they soon will as when the MC 251 came out, it just means that customers will be getting more RAM for their buck. Is this really a bad thing?

Going back on topic, let me share what I've learned about troubleshooting hardware issues. First, let me stress that it's usually not a hardware issue. Drivers, resource conflicts, and buggy BIOS/Firmware code is usually the issue. When it comes to "diagnostic" software for real hardware problems, there's little you can do. For memory, there's MemTest-86. This program hasn't failed to spot bad memory for me yet. For hard drives, go to the manufacturer's web site to get a bootable diagnostic floppy. Usually the quick tests are all that's needed, but it could pay off to do the extended test if the quick one says everything's OK. Even if the extended test comes back fine, don't rule out the drive. The problem could be intermittent. For the rest of the hardware, simply swap components around until you narrow it down. Take out that video card and toss in a spare one that you've had for several years and know works. For the CPU, toss in any other CPU that matches the original's architecture (Just a different speed rating is OK). I think you get the idea on the (Swapping out) method. Also, never underestimate the crap a poor power supply unit (PSU) can throw at you! Stability issues could be coming from an unreliable current. Of course, temperature problems could also cause these same stability issues, but that's much easier to monitor. When you get to a point where you're truly stumped, some manufacturers have forums that you can go to for help. This is especially true in the homebuilt market with Abit, VIA, AMD, etc.

Good luck and happy hunting!

-Lucas

I did that in fact, and discovered that no amount of money will buy me more memory for my otherwise just fine computer. (ECC DIMMs or some such are required)

Try 1-800-4-memory. I got a whole bunch of ECC DIMMs for my quad (P2) Xeon box from them a while back. There's a cheapo clearance section too.

Here is the best place to buy memory for the mac.

The're really easy to upgrade. Get a 512MB chip ($75), throw it in there, and never look back.

-Brett

Coast Memory is a good company to order RAM from, and they're always running deals on various different types of RAM. They currently have 64 MB EDO SIMMs for $14.60 here, and 128 MB EDO SIMMs for $29.00 here.

Coast Memory is a good company to order RAM from, and they're always running deals on various different types of RAM. They currently have 64 MB EDO SIMMs for $14.60 here, and 128 MB EDO SIMMs for $29.00 here.