A few years back I bought a computer for my kiddo. This was at a time when schools went to remote status. That was a bit of a rough time for quite a few and it took a lot to get used to as well. The hardest part was building out that routine and just getting used to it. Some days were harder than others.
The computer I bought was an Acer Aspire. The model? Aspire TC Desktop – TC-875-UR13. The reason I can recall this fairly easily now is because I searched up and down a lot for parts. Yes, parts. Tried doing a lot of research as well for what could work and what would not. I can hear some people asking why I was looking for parts. The main reason being kiddo wanted to start to play some video games. There was one game in particular that would need to have a dedicated graphics card.
Me being me, I looked up what could potentially be used and bought a small graphics card. For some reason I knew that it wouldn’t work the moment it arrived and yet I still I tried to piece it together. Turns out I needed to have a slightly more powerful power supply. The stock one was about 300 watts which was really more than enough for the CPU and the other components in the computer. The kicker here was the motherboard was using a different type of connector.
This was a new challenge for me. I searched and came across a few posts from the Acer forums, a few random Reddit posts, and I think maybe one or two Stack Overflow posts as well. Many of them pointed to having to purchase a 24 pin to 6 pin adapter. While I could potentially make my own, as one post pointed out, I don’t think I would trust myself that much just yet with electrical stuff.
The other day I was able to find my solution. After nearly 3 years of not having looked any further. Yeah. It took me that long. I was able to purchase the cable, it arrived yesterday, I tested, and it worked. So now what this means is that the computer that was once the solution to remote school is now the solution to game emulation and will be used for a bartop arcade.
I’ve been looking a little more at a replacement power supply and a graphics card upgrade that will help with some of the other games I’ve tried playing and struggle a little bit. Mostly PS2 games but that’s not a huge set of games that I play. It’s more kiddo that plays those from time to time. I am more of the actual arcade games that I wanted to play with a joystick which is why I wanted to build this out too.
I’ll find something though.