The most affordable box offers Freecell.
The most affordable box offers Freecell.
I understand your idea. My father-in-law wakes up each morning and plays FreeCell on an old computer that’s no longer working. I’m considering purchasing a very inexpensive Linux PC built into a board so it can boot directly into FreeCell. Would that be quite challenging? It would need to be highly reliable. Should I expect significant effort? A USB mouse and HDMI video output would also be nice. What’s the most affordable choice?
Consider a model similar to this: Pine A64 board 512MB. Features a 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex A53 processor supporting both 64 and 32-bit operations for flexible performance. Includes dual I/O expansion slots, a Dual Core Mali 400 MP2 graphics card, 512MB DDR3 RAM, an integrated display with HDMI 1.4a, and a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port.
If he mainly plays Freecell, you could simply find an old, outdated PC running Windows 95 and install it with most of the extra components removed. It would take up only about 35MB of space, or even less if you shrink it further—back then we did that a lot. After setup, you can modify the system.ini file so that the boot command points to freecell.exe instead of explorer.exe, allowing it to start directly in Freecell. I once changed this line to trick people, especially my father, who wouldn’t share his “important” computer because he claimed it needed special work. He’d just sit there playing Solitaire anyway. I made sure that was the only option available. Eventually, I helped build my own motherboard and assisted my brother in setting up systems to stop those domination games.