- Post apocalypse. No internet, no digital piracy. You managed to save one laptop that’s in your possession. What’s that one piece of data that you would’ve wished survived alongside you and your laptop, be it video, audio, executable or whatever? No wrong answers!
My answer: Stargate SG-1 (TV series), some 🔞 content and Linux.
- No post apocalypse, just the real world as it stands today. What’s one piece of data that you have been hunting for a long time but still haven’t been able to find or obtain it? No data shaming!
My answer: Erutan’s discography in .flac 😥
There are RetroPie images “out there” that contain a full Linux distribution, the emulators, the games, and a ten-foot interface. That’s actually what RetroPie is. It’s Linux and EmulationStation, which is like RetroArch but for TVs. RetroPie is just one option. There’s another, but I can’t think of its name. They’re competitors, but they’re not enemies, and neither of them are charging. It’s like different Linux distros, they just have different ways of doing things.
It’s stupidly easy to set up. Once you run it for the first time, it boots directly into EmulationStation, and asks you to configure whatever controller you plug in. That’s best, but you can use Bluetooth controllers, too. Once your controller is set up, you choose the system you want, then you pick from a list of games. ES can be configured to show a screenshot of the game, or a video of it being played, or a TV ad for the game, either on its own, on an old CRT TV, in an arcade cabinet, or other formats, and there might be text telling you about it. It’s very nice. Very “Netflix of gaming” kind of look/feel. Of course you can set favourites and have those in their own menu on the top level.
Shame Raspberry Pis and memory cards are so expensive these days.
If that Android phone has USB-C, it probably has HDMI out. Hook it up to a hub first, then HDMI to HDMI to a TV from the hub, then connect controllers, and a charger. (One of the USB-C’s on the hub should be marked “PD” for power delivery, or have a lightning bolt. FYI you can also connect a keyboard and mouse via a USB-C hub to an Android phone (or iPhone) and they’ll just work. Android because Linux kernel, iOS because macOS base. Android isn’t Linux and iOS isn’t macOS, but the inverse is truer than people think. Just not in the ways you actually want (e.g. my iPhone should become a Mac when plugged into devices, because the MacBook Neo has the same guts that are in my iPhone, literally).
But even with a relatively old, relatively cheap Android phone, all that is possible. I have a Galaxy S10 (2019) and all that works.