Greetings, LGR here with some fantastic news! To me at least, hehe.
I've got the Hot Wheels computer fully restored, working even better than it did when it was brand new!
It's complete, got all the stuff in here minus a little bit of the software.
I've got the full manual and everything. It's all here!
This makes me so happy because these things just died off.
They were cheaply made, horrible to work on. In fact, I've got a video coming up of restoring one of these types of computers
here pretty soon so stay tuned for that. That's going to be like twenty minutes of me getting really angry.
But this is all back together.
Just look at it in all its luster.
It's a great-looking and yet silly-looking machine at the same time.
I'm just-- I really dig the blue. In fact, I went all-out with this thing.
I actually went and got a Hot Wheels blue power cable just to match the rest of it.
And I actually plan to duplicate the flame paint job with some paints here pretty soon
on the power cables-- FLAMES! Going into here, and then into the wall. Flames everywhere!
Let me go ahead and turn it on here, because it's wonderful.
New CPU cooler, new fans, new RAM, new CMOS battery, put the original blue CD-ROM back in there,
fixed up the floppy drive, even had to repair the mouse because the left mouse button wasn't working, so
I got some replacement parts and soldered them in there, and it's all good now, man!
We're going to go ahead and take a look at this once it starts up, and I will play some games
with the steering wheel just to show you this thing in action, because man
I am super proud of this. It has taken so many hours of work to get this thing running.
It's worth it, man, at least as far as I'm concerned 'cause I wanted to get this thing stock.
So we got Windows 98 SE right here, we're going to have a little login but who cares? Just press enter.
[Hot Wheels PC] "Hot Wheels! Leading the way!"
Like my custom Hot Wheels intro right there?
"Hot Wheels! Leading the way!" 'cause '90s!
Admittedly, there's not a whole lot to see at this point but I have given it a nice custom Hot Wheels background
and a Hot Wheels mouse cursor, and Hot Wheels sound effects and everything like that at the start.
So, you know, I like to trick out things like this when it's such an obvious theme.
The only thing I actually have installed on here at the moment is Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver 2: Get'n Dirty
At least as far as a Hot Wheels game. We'll take a look at that here in a moment, but
let me just go ahead and show you-- I was surprised to see that it actually supports DOS games rather well, at least some of them.
There's some problems with sound at times, but I was able to get Doom II going pretty decently here.
General MIDI for the music and a Sound Blaster emulation for the sound effects.
Has one of those really crappy integrated SoundMAX sound cards in here, so...
It's not even a sound card, just a sound thing on a chip.
Ah, hurt me plenty.
Ah, give me that freakin' chainsaw. That's what I need.
Hot Wheels!
This was during the time of legacy-free weirdness. That just means they were not really supporting older standards at this point.
So we've got NO sound effects or music or anything with Commander Keen 4 for instance.
Unless through the PC speaker, you can do that, but it doesn't work with--
A lot of DOS games sound--
Which, whatever, this is a Windows 98 PC that is just a pure gimmick so I guess I can kind of forgive that.
I've got plenty of other computers if I want to play DOS games with proper sound, with proper sound card.
Yeah, let's go ahead and try out good ol' Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Driver 2 here.
And I'm going to adjust the camera's position so you can see me playing with the steering wheel.
And go figure that this thing is a actually piece of crap. It's got suction cups underneath there.
It's supposed to stick to your desk and of course this isn't a desk, it's just a little card table and it's not going to do anything.
There's a little screwy thing there but that isn't actually tightening onto anything because of the way the table is designed
so we've just got kind of a floppy steering wheel, but I mean, this will work. I think?
So yeah, the steering wheel is not force feedback or anything.
Of course not, it's just about the cheapest steering wheel imaginable.
But it does have these nice rubber grips and it's spring-loaded in here.
It's got a little clicky gear changer of sorts.
And...
Pedals! Sort of. It's really just like a button.
So it's kind of awful.
Whatever, man, what do you expect for something made for like eight-year-old boys?
Actually, people expected a whole lot more, to tell you the truth, and that's why these things failed.
They were ridiculously overpriced for what they were.
A lot of you have asked in the previous video, "Why don't I just like upgrade this thing like crazy?" Well,
It's just-- It's tiny, there's no room to put anything in there.
I could, like, Mini-ITX it out, yes, but I don't want to! Not this one. If I get another one, I'm going to pimp it.
I'm going to go crazy, but for this one I wanted to restore it to its original glory.
Heh heh
There's a significant dead zone, at least with this game.
I'm actually not sure how to control everything.
What flips? There's the flip. OK, that kind of makes sense, sort of.
Augh!
I feel like this thing is going to fall off the table at any moment. This is not good!
Augh!
Neeeoooom!
I love these games.
They're so simple.
Just full-motion video, a tiny little 3D model, and that's about it.
Playing with the steering wheel is exponentially more difficult than playing with a keyboard.
So, uh
Screw this.
Oh another thing, some of you were asking how this thing plugs in since there's no game port on here.
This is actually a USB wheel setup, so it's not serial or anything like that.
It is a USB steering wheel, which is pretty neat.
Everything here plugs in via USB, so USB keyboard, USB mouse, USB steering wheel.
Aw
Well there goes that.
Heh heh heh
But yeah
That is the Hot Wheels computer really quickly.
I will be doing a more detailed video, like I said, of repairing one of these kinds of computers, and then
at some point I would like to do sort of a more proper review of these things, how they came to be,
and all that stuff, because I really do find these fascinating.
It's one of those legendary machines that you always heard of, at least I always did.
"Oh man, I heard of some kid at school, he had a Hot Wheels computer."
"What? Are you kidding me?"
So yeah, it's just-- It's neat.
It's an interesting little piece of history that, uh,
It sucks, but it's something that, I think, it's worth repairing and looking into.
Oh, Patriot Computers. They went bankrupt because of these things.
They were so bad. I really can't wait for you all to see the repair video because, I'm telling you,
it's an adventure to get one of these things working because there's a lot of challenges that you don't get from a lot of modern systems.
Well, that's pretty much it for this quick update.
Thank you very much for watching!