A Vintage VHS Player Gets New Life as a Stealth Gaming Machine

Matt received a broken Quasar VHS player from a family member who knew his habit of turning odd objects into computers. The unit arrived dusty, with a forgotten tape still inside and its mechanisms seized from years of disuse. On the workbench it looked like any other relic destined for the curb. After weeks of careful work it now runs modern games at 1440p and holds its own at 4K in several titles.

Many of his design decisions were based on the amount of space inside the plastic casing. To keep things compact, he chose an ITX motherboard, which makes sense when working with restricted space. The Gigabyte A520I AC is an excellent pick, with Wi-Fi, solid connectivity, and a single M.2 slot, all at a reasonable price. Matt decided to couple it with a Ryzen 5 5600. This six-core, twelve-thread processor provided enough oomph to handle high-fidelity gaming without exceeding the power or heat limits of his compact design.

Matt chose a Sapphire Pulse RX 6600 XT graphics card with dual fans, and the GPU easily handles demanding games at 1440p and 4K with medium settings with upscaling in many situations. Storage came from a 1TB Crucial P1 NVMe drive he had lying around, and memory, of course, was 32GB of Corsair LPX DDR4-3600. Before he started tinkering with the casing, he had spent roughly $850 on parts.

Power supply selection was a bit of a headache, primarily since normal SFX units would not fit in the limited area. So Matt went with a tiny 400W FSP Flex ATX supply, which sort of fit, although it gets a little loud under load and comes with older-style wires. He had to use an extension cord to transfer power from the wall to the case where it lives. First, he disassembled the entire unit, including every screw, the top cover, and the front panel. He was shocked by how much dust came out; it was as if the case was a hoover disguised. A piece of Lion King tape was even discovered during the disassembly procedure. The next step was to remove the plastic standoffs and bracing, which he performed using a rotary tool, cutoff wheels, and flush cutters. Once it was completed, the interior was relatively clean.

A custom skeleton made of aluminum angle stock then served to give the components something to mount on. He chopped some aluminium into the desired shape, bent it at 45 degrees, drilled some holes, and created a U-shaped frame to support the motherboard and GPU. Additional brackets were required to support the power supply and prevent the GPU from slumping into a corner. Of course, there were countersunk bolts and precise alignment to deal with the offset original mounting holes. Overall, it was somewhat fiddly.

To get the front panel to operate again, he had to rebuild it somewhat because the original buttons did not line up properly after he was inside the casing. So he attached the new buttons to some little aluminum brackets, which were held in place with screws and super glue underneath the plastic. The power button and LED just plug into the motherboard headers, while the three additional buttons he added are utilized to control media playing using an Arduino Pro Micro. Matt simply created some code to map them to keyboard shortcuts for play/pause and volume, nothing too complex. Finally, he installed a Silverstone remote start module that allows us to power the entire setup from across the room using a key fob, allowing him to turn it on and off without having to physically touch the case.

After running the system through its initial tests, he saw that the CPU temperatures were rising far too quickly, reaching 90 degrees after only a few minutes of load. He ended up drilling a grid of quarter-inch holes above the low-profile Thermalright cooler to increase airflow out of it, as well as cutting out some GPU vents in the frame and shell where possible.Matt also added some rubber feet to elevate the entire thing off the ground, allowing it to pull in air from the bottom more effectively. After making all of these changes, the CPU temperature remained low, generally in the upper seventy, even under extended, continuous loads.

The first time he powered it up after routing all of the cords and wiring up the custom controls, everything went well. Windows installed without trouble. Matt believes that if you want a small, always-on setup for day-to-day use, a Linux distribution like Bazzite would be a better choice than Windows. And in terms of performance, it definitely delivered. Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K on medium settings averaged 100 frames per second, with 1% lows of roughly 69. Borderlands 3 displayed comparable stable results at the same resolution and setting. Unfortunately, its handling of modern games is just good enough to allow you to play at higher resolutions without having to perform any significant fine tuning.