The hours of tinkering, troubleshooting, and configuring were mine - not AI. The “Super Pretendo 5” exists because I built it, not because of a mockup Sega attack ad from 1993.
If the fun wrapper offends you, that’s your hang-up, not mine. If your big move is policing how I shared my joy, congrats - you win the 'hall monitor of fake internet points" retroachivement.
Windows sucks…but the M93p is old and Windows has bespoke drivers for it to coax the most out of the iGPU. The m93p really is tiny (1L case) and presents no real possibility for plugging in a GPU.
I’ve also had really shitty luck getting stuff to run under Proton.
Don’t worry. It’s the only thing in the house running windows. We’re all about the penguin here (Raspbian, Zorin, PopOS and a few others)
Besides which, there’s a peverse pleasure in torturing Windows into doing what you want :)
Bazzite is just for steam, right? Would that mean it plays Windows based games via Proton layer? Proton blows on Batocera. Shame, because Bato was pretty nice.
I strongly dislike Windows, but it was the only way I could cobble together something for this use case that just works
I’m getting that vibe lol. My bad.
It had Batocera on it :)
Batocera is wonderful, until you want to mix and match it with PC games or steam stuff. Then it makes your life more difficult than you’d expect.
(Weirdly, I find some of the standalone emulators legitimately work better in Windows that Bato.
Dolphin, PCSX2, PPSSPP etc are much more performant).
Some other perks: In windows, one neat thing is being able to run multiple instances of same emulator, slightly differently.
For example, Dolphin doesn’t allow you to enable / disable Vsync per game.
Which means, you can have some games upscaled (but with screen tearing) or native resolution (but no screen tear)…but not both within same emulator. Think Rogue squadron etc.
No big deal if you’re emulating on something with grunt, but when you’re using office refuse from a decade ago, every little bit helps.
In Windows, I just create c:/dolphin1 and c:/dolphin 2, and tweak each game as needed.
TL: DR: i’m using win 8.1 for the OS, stripped to the bone, and replaced Explorer.exe with Playnite. I genuinely think it’s a touch faster than Batocera and more maliable to PC stuff.
PS: I also had RetroBat for a while but it was doing something or other that made a few games less performant.
You’re not wrong about “freedom within limits” when it comes to gaming imho. Having access to everything means you/they will play nothing. Witness my Steam library :/
But introducing artifical scarcity means you can curate the experience with them. Something small, bespoke and meaningful that you can bond over.
As the saying goes, you can never step in the same river twice, but you can point out the best spot for others.
Proton must have come along in leaps and bounds since I last used it in that case.
What front end does Bazzite use? I understood it to have Steam baked in; most of my games are from other sources, like GoG.
I think once Steam kills support for Win 10 (probs in a year or two, based on history) the smart move is going to be something like Bazzite.