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You start by downloading project64k, which has an online play thingy included.
Then, you look for people who are waiting to play Super Smash Brothers. You'll need a rom, of course.

Sadly, I have a high ping and as such, the online play kinda sucks - but it's still great to be able to play this classic with some stranger over the internets. You won't have the trash talking with buddies like you can get in halo, that's for sure, but I believe this game is enough by its own damn self ^^

OK, all the obligatory WarGames jokes aside... if you were a Linux developer, would you really want them to be using your product for such important stuff? I'll be honest, if someone came up to me and said they wanted to use Ultima Linux for missile defense or something like that, I'm not sure that I'd say yes.

So why wouldn't I want all that fame and fortune? One simple reason: Negative publicity. Yes, negative. How? Well, simple.

What if the system were to fail?

Now, I'm not badmouthing Linux or anything here – especially not my own system ;-) – but even the most stable distributions can crash. For example, all my systems run my distro, which is for the most part a very highly customized Slackware. Well, Slackware's legendary for its stability, and for the most part everything runs just fine, but it can still be brought to its knees, say, if I decided to pull up a really CPU-intensive and potentially dangerous program such as Mupen64 to play Mario Kart without having to walk downstairs to my N64. It usually does just fine, but if it goes down, the entire system soon follows...

Just something to think about if you suspect that you may be the next RedHawk ;-)

The previous generation of consoles were the N64 and PSX, neither of which are emulated on the PSP yet (the PSX isn't even well-emulated on the PC yet).

PSX is well emulated. For example, ePSXe has played everything I've bothered throwing at it on my 1GHz Duron 512MB GeForce2MX 64MB machine (but development seems to have halted), but I've yet to find a good N64 emulator - Mupen64, for example, constantly cuts sound and slows down in large areas, not to mention hangs randomly (in Z:OoT).

I'm waiting for an Opteron-optimized build of 1964, an Nintendo 64 emulator, before I upgrade.

Well, luckily since it is a 64-bit architecture it should be no problem to run Nintendo 64 games either.

You won't see people hacking the Xbox 2 and porting an emulator because the new Treacherous Computing technology, which may be used in the Xbox 2, is more powerful than the original Xbox lockout. Because most of the decent N64 exclusives are copyright Nintendo, which has a policy of not porting its titles to non-Nintendo platforms, you won't see companies adapting a community N64 emulator the same way Jaleco adapted PocketNES for its GBA ports of classic NES games.

You want to get this.

NesterDC is cool, and works pretty well. Judging from the site, it doesn't look like it's getting maintained too well, but I have a version from 3 years ago that runs fine for most games.

I have several hundred NES games on this one CD, and I play it more often than my Xbox or Gamecube. Tetris2 is two-player, it's highly recommended when you're trying to get girls to play video games with you (my Atari 2600 works for this too).

I'm a firm believer that games haven't gotten any more fun* over the years, they are just more elaborate.

* the exception being MMORPG's - I just started Star Wars, and I'm totally blown away by how cool it is

What about emulating a Nintendo 64?

Actually there are several N64 emulators...Sixty Force is one of the oldes and the best, to quote emulation.net "it has sound support, and the speeds are excellent on a fast G3 or G4. Most importantly, many games seem to work perfectly." Others include True Reality and Mupen 64 both of which have Linux Windows and Mac ports.

My son is playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time right now, and I'd love to see it hacked to anti-alias the textures better, if nothing else.

That's what N64 emulators are for. Get a good video card with TV-out, and a fast computer to go with it, and you can play Ocarina of Time like never before. I think one of the graphics plugins even supports Anisotropic filtering.

Learn more at Emulation64

Also, Can anyone hack a game that was originally just for a gaming console?

Yes, I think that is evidenced well enough by all the level-conversion mods that have popped up for Super Mario World, some quite good. You can get more info on these at Zophar's Domain

Yes, most emulators on the Dreamcast suck still. But for the old NES games, NesterDC (official site, condensed download site, bootable CD-R's on Dreamcast) works perfectly. The games play just like they do on the original NES, which I guess isn't really saying much, considering the hardware difference between the NES and DC. But to say that the Dreamcast can't even handle NES is really inaccurate.

NESterDC is great and all (obvious understatement :) but I think the all the fuss about emulation on the Xbox has to do with that it's got quite a bit more power to handle the more demanding games emulated in MAME. With a little bit of tweeking, the newer Midway games, CPS2, and Stun Runner to name a few might run at a good (full?) speed, whereas on the Dreamcast that might not be possible (maybe, but requiring a lot more work).

i was more interested in the "dreamcast controller hacks" aspect of the post.

what exactly is available and what where you looking for?

dreamcast is now only 80 dollars, a keyboard is 20, plus 20 more for a mouse. add 60 for a broadband adapter and you have a pretty well rounded game console. also, in the coming months, dreamcast stuff will start appearing in funcoland`s and the like and stuff will be cheaper.

also, there are tons of cool stuff like nester dc or a vcd player, a divx player, and tons of other stuff including linuxdc

i`m looking for a hack for adding other controllers such as an old nintendo controller to play on dreamcast.