DIY emulation in 2023

Intro

I've been told this is currently the 2020s, and so it's time for my decennial post on how to emulate classic games.  I've been chasing the high of modded original Xboxes running XBMC and a collection of emulators since 2006.  The main selling point of that setup was how slick the interface was.  Just turn it on and do everything with the controller on a UI that was clearly designed for a TV.  The main downside was having a huge Xbox in your living room, and having to use wired controllers.

Last decade's solution was a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie, which worked ok, but the interface was never that great and it struggled with N64.

Separately, the Roku I use to watch Plex, Netflix, and other media is starting to show its age, and I wouldn't mind something more open source.

My plan was to buy a mini PC, put linux on it, maybe some HTPC distro, and use that for both media and emulation.

I'll skip over the saga and say that the media playback didn't work out.  I had assumed there would just be native clients for Netflix and others available, but there isn't.  There are the web versions, and maybe something could be done with launching the web versions seemlessly, but it just didn't feel like it'd ever have the slick UI I wanted.

Incidentally, around this time I got an Nvidia Shield donated to me and discovered SmartTubeNext, which is a Youtube player which skips ads, including portions of the videos about sponsors themselves.  That greatly reduced my desire for media playback on the mini PC.  I've also been very happy with pairing the Shield with an Xbox controller to play game via Steam Link on my Desktop PC.

So what did I end up with?

The focus then was just emulation, from N64 and older.  First, I bought this Mini PC for $200.  Note there are a ton of these around this price point, and they all have similar specs.  I sort of regret buying this one because it has a very loud fan, despite the fact that the listing claimed it was silent when I bought it (and later removed that claim), and because this one doesn't support any sort of Wake On LAN or boot on power restore, so there is no way to for me to turn it on remotely, and I can't leave it on 24/7 because of how absurd the fan is.

I also bought this IR USB dongle for $20.  I intended on setting it all up manually, but ended up just installing the FLIRC program from the repos and liking it a lot.  I set up buttons on my remote to map to Alt+F4 (close program), ESC, and a custom shortcut I set up to show the desktop.  Between those and the obvious stuff like arrow keys and enter, I found it pretty easy to use with a remote.  The only things I have on the desktop are Steam and RetroArch, as well as a few useful tools, including a shortcut to power off.

I was using my Logitech Harmony 300 remote until some of the button finally started to give out.  I replaced that with this remote I got for $40, which I like quite a bit.

I also have this wireless N64 controller that I got for $40, and which you can use with actual N64s or via a USB dongle on a PC.

And I found this amazing archive of every ROM ever on Internet Archive.  I got all the N64 and older ROMs from the systems I wanted, and filtered the sets down to the games I had heard of.

I installed Xubuntu on there, although I'm keeping my eye on KDE's Plasma Bigscreen, which looks very promising for what I want to do, but right now is only available on ARM hardware.

So overall I'm happy with this set up.  I have to get up to turn it on, but after that I can control everything with the remote and controller.  I've been playing a lot of N64 games on it, and they generally work well.  Goldeneye's sound stutters, but I googled what to tweak in the setting to get the best performance out of it, and that was enough to play through the campaign.  Mario 64 I'm about halfway through and it's been flawless.