Earlier this year, my father-in-law mentioned to me, casually, that he would be interested in a retro game console. When the family comes over, we often find ourselves sitting around the living room watching TV together, and he thought it might be nice if we spent that time playing games together instead. He has memories of playing games on an old Sega Saturn. I told him I could very easily make that happen, and over the course of the year I’ve been working on this project as a Christmas gift to my family.

The Hardware

I had several months to noodle on each decision along the way. The first question was the hardware for such a device.

I considered making a Small Form Factor PC (SFFPC). I had seen sexy SFFPC build videos, and it seemed like a fun challenge. Critically, I had a graphics card lying around: an RTX 2070 Super that had been my faithful companion for five years. I upgraded to an RTX 5070Ti recently, but I hadn’t figured out what to do with the old card.

I didn’t go for it. SFFPCs are expensive and impractical. In my opinion, they mostly serve as a nerdy statement piece, a demonstration of your PC building skills. When I was younger, I absolutely would have sought nerd clout in this way, but age has taught me that nerd clout turns out to be pretty oversold. It would be fun to do the hardware, but it’s not what interests me most about the project. Luckily, this project doesn’t need much power, and you can use a humble mini PC.

Mini PCs are excellent. They’re cheap, cute, and power efficient. They have integrated Wifi and Bluetooth. You can easily slap one onto the back of a TV or the bottom of a desk. The personal computer has come so far in just a few years, and most mere mortals can meet all their computation needs with a mini PC smaller than a tissue box.

A cheap mini PC can easily run games up to the PlayStation 2 era. The beauty of retro games is that you can get by with integrated graphics cards and less storage, and they are no less fun and engaging than modern games.

I remember when the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360, and the Playstation 3 came out. It felt titanic, these console releases. The Playstation 3 was the most powerful, but the Xbox 360 had Halo. And I had to try out the successor to Super Smash Bros Melee, which would be on the Wii. If you had told me, back then, that in twenty years I would be able to buy a device that was cheaper than all of those consoles, despite inflation, and that it would be able to run all of those games using free software, I would think it was a wonderful time to be alive.

Anyway, I took my time on mini PC selection. I sniffed around for deals, and I’m glad I had this phase because it gave me time to read up on the various options for Linux distributions and emulators and game controllers.

I picked Bazzite Linux for this, so that steered me to find a mini PC with an AMD chipset. Nvidia is historically unsupportive of Linux and the Bazzite website specifies that Nvidia chips suffered in performance.

Then there’s the controllers. Luckily, the market for third part generic game controllers has progressed long past the old, cheap-feeling Mad Catz products I remember. I tried out some 8BitDo products and was shocked at how premium they felt for their price.

After working with the hardware for more than a few minutes, I recognized the need for a handheld keyboard. I found the RII K06 Wireless Keyboard, and that did the trick. Again, very satisfied and impressed with Chinese electronics. If you do some research, you can usually find sturdy, thoughtfully designed products for staggeringly cheap.

The Software

Here’s a quick download on Linux for those who don’t know. Linux is an operating system like Microsoft’s Windows 11 or Apple’s MacOS. But instead of being sold by a corporation, Linux is written and distributed by volunteers. Nerdy volunteers. The code is all available on the internet, free for anyone to compile, change, and distribute under an open source license. Thus, Linux comes in a lot of flavors called “distributions” with their own philosophies and subcultures.

The hot new distribution for gaming is Bazzite, a non-mutable descendent of the Fedora distribution that includes lots of great features for exactly this kind of use case. As this project progressed, I discovered several useful applications baked into Bazzite that added a lot of depth to the project.

For example, Sunshine and Moonlight streaming. This wasn’t strictly part of the project, but I’ve been interested in streaming video games over a network so you don’t have to be in the same room as the computer. For example, I could be running a resource-intensive game like Baldur’s Gate 3 on my big desktop computer in my bedroom but playing the game on the kitchen table on my laptop. It’s best done with turn-based games, since lag and stuttering are unavoidable.

Sunshine and Moonlight are open source applications for doing exactly that, and they work like a charm. And Bazzite already had them installed; I just had to run a single terminal command and it was ready to go.

The most crucial piece of software came from a need I slowly realized: I’m going to have to debug this thing when it breaks. I’m the IT department for this device, and my customer is a baby boomer. I’m willing to be IT, but it’s kind of hard to do when I’m a hundred miles away. I needed to be able to control the computer from a distance.

Enter Tailscale, a wonderful solution for linking computers together through the internet privately and easily. Through some black magic that they explain on their website, they are able to forge encrypted connections between any two computers. You can ssh into a computer this way without having to port forward a socket to the internet, a dangerous practice that lets hackers poke at the defenses of your computer. Tailscale offers Taildrop, a feature for sending files from computer to computer. You can even run Sunshine and Moonlight through this service and stream through it. It’s an elegant piece of software, and—what’s this?—it’s included with Bazzite too? Yeah, it’s just another simple terminal command to activate that too.

The Games

This project turned into a walk down memory lane, a revisiting of all my favorite games from my childhood. As mentioned elsewhere, I was a big fan of Nintendo. I think the Gameboy Advance SP was the apex of their handheld platforms (perhaps until the Nintendo Switch came out). But I also had a hand-me-down Nintendo 64 and later a Gamecube and a Playstation 2 and an Xbox 360 that red-ringed.

It turns out that many of these older games are verging on being abandonware. The games are available for download without going to sketchy sites, and their copyrights aren’t being enforced.

The first install was Baku Baku Animal, a family favorite Sega Saturn title and the number one game in mind for this project. I’m glad I gave each game emulator a try because there were hiccups around controller configuration and sound configuration that I wouldn’t have predicted.

Paying for It

Since I had so much time, I was in no hurry to pay for the hardware. One of my general goals for my life was that I wanted to be a little more frugal and take better control of my finances. So I checked my budget and saw that I could save $25 dollars a day if I charged my car for free at work and meal prepped my lunches. So I started waking up earlier so I could nab charging spots and I started cooking beans and rice and fresh veggies for my lunches. I kept a running sum of my savings and slowly watched that number build up.

This would become what I now call my FUNd. It’s guilt-free money that I can spend however I want to. I add to it when I make healthy choices to save money, and sometimes I put bounties on certain tasks to encourage myself to get them done. But the real value of the FUNd is how it directly rewards me for being disciplined about my life.

Every time I woke up early or ate my lunches, I remembered that I was saving money and that I was going to be able to afford this mini PC as a reward. It made it meaningful for me to do so, which is an excellent motivator when you’re making challenging adjustments to your daily routine. I love games, and I could use that to connect with my in laws over games, and I gamified that motivation into better, healthier habits for myself.

If my father-in-law is reading, thank you. Your commission has helped me take better care of myself, and when I deliver this gift to you, it will be imbued with several weeks of my experience and thought. I can’t think of the last time I have put so much effort into a gift. I hope you enjoy it.