Weekend Project
Get to grips with some serious tech tinkering to
boost your computer and other devices
58 22 Jan - 4 Feb 2020
If you’reworriedaboutKodi’sbad
reputationforprovidingaccesstoillegal
content,youshouldknowthatthereis
nothingintrinsicallyillegalabout
downloadingandinstallingKodi,aslong
asyoudon’tuseit todownloadorstream
copyrightedmaterial.Theprocesswe’re
usingit forin thisWeekendProjectis
completelylegal.
If youdon’talreadyhavea copyof
Kodi,youcandownloadthesoftwareHow to...
Create your own retro
gaming arcade for free
Wayne Williams shows you how to play a huge collection of
classic games while staying on the right side of the law
What you need
Building your own, fully legal retro
gaming arcade requires an emulator, but
we won’t be installing a standalone one
for this project. Instead, we’re using Kodi
for the task because the latest version of
the popular home-theatre system (18.5
‘Leia’) supports a number of popular
emulators and provides an easy way
of displaying your favourite games on
a TV or monitor.
directly from kodi.tv. For the emulation
element, you need RetroArch (www
.retroarch.com). Both programs are
available for all major platforms. We
show you how to install RetroArch
in our Mini Workshop, opposite.
You’ll also need to install the Internet
Archive Game Launcher (IAGL) in Kodi- see the next section, Install IAGL, for
instructions on how to do this. IAGL
provides direct access to all the games
M T W T F S S
I
f you’re keen to play old games but no longer have the
hardware to run them on, there are loads of different
free emulators available to download, covering almost
every arcade game, computer and console ever made.
However, an emulator is nothing without the games and,
unfortunately, adding them usually means downloading
the relevant ROMs, which is is essentially illegal. Many
developers are happy for people who purchased the
original game to download a version of it that will run on
modern hardware but, if you didn’t own the original, you
shouldn’t download a ROM version of it.
Thankfully, you don’t need to break the law to get your
retro gaming fix because there is a completely legal way
to enjoy arcade and console games for free. In this issue’s
Weekend Project, we show you how to get started.