I’ve been a gamer for pretty much my entire life which means that I’ve collected quite a few gaming machines over the years. My collection dates back to the original NES days, but sadly my Atari 2600 did not survive past the mid 80’s. Anything that I had Atari is long gone and probably rotting somewhere in a dumpster pile.

Currently my main gaming machines that I have hooked up are my Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. I don’t mind my kid playing with the Nintendo Wii as I basically get no use out of it but for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, I’m always a bit paranoid about how he handles those as he is only 4. For starters, I’ve had him accidentally purchase stuff off the Xbox Live Marketplace which cost me quite a few Microsoft Points. I’ve since learned to log off Live when he wants to play something.

The other day, I had this brilliant idea to dig up the old original Xbox. I have a spare old TV laying around my house so I decided to connect my original Xbox to that. Now why was I doing this? Well, my idea was that if I pulled out the old Xbox, I wouldn’t worry so much about my son destroying anything since #1, it isn’t connected to the network and #2 since my Xbox is chipped and upgraded with a larger harddrive, I was able to copy many of the games I owned to the hard drive so that he would never need to even touch any of the game discs. I have a huge library of older Xbox games, many of which are suitable for young children. In fact, I’ll have to say that I have more children friendly games on my old Xbox than I do on my current Xbox 360 or PS3. Right now, I have several old Disney games loaded up for him that he can play as well as some kid friendly games. Since my Xbox is chipped and loaded with the XBMC dashboard, I may also install some retro emulators on there so see if he wants to go further back into gaming history and play some old NES games. One problem though, those huge original Xbox controllers are a tad big in his hands. Its like holding two giant potatoes. I may have to confiscate my brother’s smaller Xbox controllers that I know he will never use again.

I found this to be a great solution if you don’t want your kids messing around with your latest and greatest systems. Sure your old gaming rigs might have sentimental value, but most of the time they are just sitting in storage not being used so why not put them to good use and let your kids enjoy the games that you used to enjoy when you were younger?

I’m thinking of now hooking up my old Nintendo 64 for him to play on as he really loves playing Mario games on my Nintendo DS and N64 had plenty of Mario games on it.