I’m attempting to build a boxen with the capability of playing emulated games in addition to media playback. I’m having some trouble getting… well, anything working. I am mainly focused on Playstation emulation – Xenia is, unfortunately, a pipe dream and probably wouldn’t work on this hardware anyway.
Platform: Arch Linux, dated within the last month or so
Hardware: recent-gen i3, no legacy boot support (grumble grumble), 8gb ram, mostly managed over SSH but with the possibility of direct terminal access after a fashion. This is a generic boxen bought from a store.
So far, I’ve managed to get Retroarch to launch, which required killing kodi and gdm. After launch, the emulator did not respond to inputs from either a controller or the keyboard. After logging in via SSH and killing the process, I noted that the TTY behind the emulator had intercepted all keyboard inputs for some reason. Launching the emulator from SSH resulted in the same issue. Attempting to launch while Kodi and gdm are active results in a xorg error. I also tried both Advanced Launcher, and Advanced Mame Launcher – but documentation on creating custom launchers is non-existent at present, and I have no idea how to launch an emulator from within them without using their own existing plugins. I also tried to get Swanstation to work through Retroarch, but AKL could not detect it and attempting to launch it from terminal with args resulted in no significant change in behaviour. I have also attempted psx-reloaded as a standalone emulator, but this dropped a bunch of issues into journalctl and promptly stopped.
Caveats:
– The media centre relies on a standalone package which launches Kodi on boot. This is provided by kodi-standalone-service package (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/kodi-…ne-service), although it is installed in combination with v20, not v21
– The window manager in place is GDM. It is launched with the service unit provided by kodi-standalone-service, not the normal GDM unit. This unit is demonstrated here: https://github.com/graysky2/kodi-standal…bm.service
– The emulator can not stop the kodi-gbm service. Doing so breaks system integration, meaning kodi cannot send shutdown or reboot signals when the service is restarted.
– I prefer a non MAME solution, but if this is unavoidable… well, so be it.
– The emulator must have physical disc support alongside ROM support – I have a collection of discs that I’d prefer not to have to rip myself.
– This is an x86 system, so stuff like reARMed is probably not going to work.
Burning issues:
– The standalone service package requires a semi-existent nopasswd user to be created. The user has no real home directory, although I have created one in some attempts to provide configuration for the emulator. It has no .bashrc file at present. This is also the only user that can seemingly access the screen, which may present an issue. I could possibly create some configuration for this user, but it is possible that doing so will break the kodi-standalone-service package.
– I can’t update to v21 at the moment, because a number of addons I rely on for things like library ordering and beautification have no candidates for v21 yet. I can usually find packages from archives if necessary – btw, where did all the package stuff for v20 go? The repo doesn’t seem to contain anything for nexus anymore, which is kinda annoying.
Any advice on what I should try next? Disclosure, I am also posting this on the arch forums – I just thought someone here might have tried this for themselves at some point.