Unsure if this is the place to ask or not but figured it was closest to it.
Basically I am looking to make an AIO retro gaming PC. Main goal is to have one simple box hooked up to the TV so my friends and I can game without having to swap discs and consoles all the time. Would probably use mostly DS3 (or 4?) controllers hooked up with USB or via BT.
I know lemmy doesn’t much care about piracy but this is all just to play games/consoles we legally own. Would include PS1-3, Nintendo, SNES, N64, Gamecube (think that is all we have).
I think https://batocera.org/ has been mentioned, Lakka (maybe this is more for pis?), and EmuDeck has been mentioned. Basically looking for the easiest distro to throw on a PC with a nice UI (can be launched via kb/mouse, all the same to me) that has the emulators built in and just needs the ROMs.
Emudeck is a fancy setup script. It’s not an OS or a Front End. However, you could install SteamOS or Windows and use Emudeck to import roms into Steam. Steams big picture mode is fantastic and familiar.
Check out Retro Game Corps guide on how to do it in Windows.
For hardware here is RGC’s excellent easy spreadsheet for mini pc comparisons (speed/cost/what each can and can’t do).
I tried getting a steamos box up and running and it was such a pain. The official site gives you a steamdeck version of the os so you have to use something like chimeraos which doesnt work without a gpu.
I eventually got it running using a different regular desktop linux os i found through some youtube video recommendations for gaming and had steam launch in big picture mode but then that broke and I had two steam instances installed and it seemed to forget each time it launched and would reinstall itself.
Next id try pop os as that seems highly recommended here but i ended up just giving up on a steam os box to use to stream from my main pc and just moved my main pc to my tv