Tagged “batocera”

• Games for the living room 07 May 2024

  We've had an old (2021) Dell laptop lying around for a while and I thought turning it into a gaming machine for the living room might be fun.

  Now when I say gaming, I'm not really a gamer. I grew up playing point and click adventures (still the best game format in my opinion) and in the late 00's I had an XBox 360 where I played a lot of Red Dead Redemption. Oh, and I have a WiiU in a box somewhere but it has a UK plug and it seems dangerous to have it plugged in to an adapter all the time.

  I like playing old games. I got my daughter a Miyoo game boy-style handheld for Christmas and under the guise of "testing" to make sure it would be good to go on the big day I also picked one up for myself.

  I've looked into a few options for this Dell laptop (Inspiron 5502 for those who are wondering, whatever that signifies), I'm not a big PC guy - I use a Mac as my daily driver - so removing Windows was a priority. I've played with Linux here and there over the years so that's always an option.

  I first tried Batocera, a convenient living room display-style screen mode for retro gaming but I wasn't able to install it off the USB stick to the drive in the laptop.

  So now I'm trying out ChimeraOS. It bases itself off Steam so I can access games I have on there, as well as retro emulated games.

  I've realised I don't actually have any games in Steam so the homepage is a little lackluster right now (mainly Half Life when it was on a free promo and classic YNAB), but that can be added to.

  I found my old WiiU Pro controller and it connected instantly which I was impressed with. The next step is to get Steam Link working on my iPad so I can play some new point and click games I've been interested in but they're only on PC.

  Now I need to find some time to actually play some games...

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