sokky
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we must not forget to have fun. we must never forget to do that
sokky art thread
- Thread starter sokky
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sokky
Active member
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- Jan 30, 2025
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- Spring, TX
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- sokky.artstation.com
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- they/them
sokky
Active member
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- Jan 30, 2025
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- Spring, TX
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- sokky.artstation.com
- Gold
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I spent like, half a week getting to that point even though that video is now a bit outdated and I've made more changes and polish to it
To explain: I wanted to try my hand at making a sort of diy linux based game console to play pirated games or backups stored on SD cards rather than Bluray or DVD.
Games are getting to be 70 GB on average and I'm not about to keep games that i may want to visit every once in a while but don't own or don't want to pay for on a 12TB hard drive to gather dust and not touch.
Especially when I can use that drive for other things like.... maybe running my own IPTV channels and hosting the shows and video that's necessary for that.
So, external media. Old consoles used to actually Play Games FROM the disc. Can you believe it? Turns out that the PS3 even had problems with this. The reason MGS4 needed an install of the game back in 2008 was because the assets quite literally couldn't be streamed from bluray quick enough. And that would result in some pretty unsatisfactory load times or stuttering in game. I've tested with an extreme case and a not so extreme case with Death Stranding and Nier Automata respectively. One got really painfully long load times (NA), and the other was beyond unplayable (DS). It would take 5 or 8 minutes to load into the main menu, then another 5 or 8 minutes to get in game. And every 5 or 6 seconds spent traveling in a single direction would result in 10 minute load times or never finish loading. Bluray is a no go. SD cards are flash memory and far faster, thus SD cards for my system.
They get pretty cheap* when you go for certain sizes in piecemeal, though when you compare it to buying a single SSD at twice or triple the size you end up paying far more in total to have more permanent flexible storage. It's the same for optical disks too, honestly. But the plus side is that you have these shelf stable cards solely dedicated to having the thing that you want on them available at a moment's notice instead of having to wait to redownload a thing from a torrent and waiting for it to extract and install and etc. Do it once and you have it perpetually.
So! I needed something made to actually play these cards just as conveniently as a game console would. I'm not gonna have a PC plugged into my TV for me to have to crawl up to it and use a keyboard and mouse to run VLC to play a movie when I could have a tenfoot interface and a TV remote. Turns out this is simpler to do than you'd think, but still pretty annoying to set up.
Currently I'm trying to make a JEOS or light linux distro that only runs this frontend I made in Godot, a collection of bash scripts running as system services, and gamescope and wine going through box64 and/or box86 to play Windows games on a Raspberry Pi (arm cpu).
It has save data! It legitimately works akin to a game cartridge on a 3DS or Switch where the data on the cart is read only, but it can load updates and user data from the console's internal storage. OverlayFS supports this handily and quite easily. Godot just has a script that points to the folders I've designated on the system and tells me what's in them and how large they are. It'll even let me delete them if I need to.
The game cards I've made also have metadata and extra files that the scripts look for to determine that they're game cards for this specific use case. Game icons and names are present so the frontend can show the user what game they have saved or loaded and about to run. It also does autorun, so you could insert it and have it immediately boot straight into the game. Not on by default, of course.
I lastly want to put in input remapping ala Steam Input and have an overlay or "Xbox Guide" style flyout when pressing a home button of sorts. The great news is all of this has been done by another project known as OpenGamepadUI, which also runs using Godot. I have proof that it works, which is how I even decided to use Godot for this in the first place.
That was a lot of words, but surprisingly there was a lot of context and features to go over!
To explain: I wanted to try my hand at making a sort of diy linux based game console to play pirated games or backups stored on SD cards rather than Bluray or DVD.
Games are getting to be 70 GB on average and I'm not about to keep games that i may want to visit every once in a while but don't own or don't want to pay for on a 12TB hard drive to gather dust and not touch.
Especially when I can use that drive for other things like.... maybe running my own IPTV channels and hosting the shows and video that's necessary for that.
So, external media. Old consoles used to actually Play Games FROM the disc. Can you believe it? Turns out that the PS3 even had problems with this. The reason MGS4 needed an install of the game back in 2008 was because the assets quite literally couldn't be streamed from bluray quick enough. And that would result in some pretty unsatisfactory load times or stuttering in game. I've tested with an extreme case and a not so extreme case with Death Stranding and Nier Automata respectively. One got really painfully long load times (NA), and the other was beyond unplayable (DS). It would take 5 or 8 minutes to load into the main menu, then another 5 or 8 minutes to get in game. And every 5 or 6 seconds spent traveling in a single direction would result in 10 minute load times or never finish loading. Bluray is a no go. SD cards are flash memory and far faster, thus SD cards for my system.
They get pretty cheap* when you go for certain sizes in piecemeal, though when you compare it to buying a single SSD at twice or triple the size you end up paying far more in total to have more permanent flexible storage. It's the same for optical disks too, honestly. But the plus side is that you have these shelf stable cards solely dedicated to having the thing that you want on them available at a moment's notice instead of having to wait to redownload a thing from a torrent and waiting for it to extract and install and etc. Do it once and you have it perpetually.
So! I needed something made to actually play these cards just as conveniently as a game console would. I'm not gonna have a PC plugged into my TV for me to have to crawl up to it and use a keyboard and mouse to run VLC to play a movie when I could have a tenfoot interface and a TV remote. Turns out this is simpler to do than you'd think, but still pretty annoying to set up.
Currently I'm trying to make a JEOS or light linux distro that only runs this frontend I made in Godot, a collection of bash scripts running as system services, and gamescope and wine going through box64 and/or box86 to play Windows games on a Raspberry Pi (arm cpu).
It has save data! It legitimately works akin to a game cartridge on a 3DS or Switch where the data on the cart is read only, but it can load updates and user data from the console's internal storage. OverlayFS supports this handily and quite easily. Godot just has a script that points to the folders I've designated on the system and tells me what's in them and how large they are. It'll even let me delete them if I need to.
The game cards I've made also have metadata and extra files that the scripts look for to determine that they're game cards for this specific use case. Game icons and names are present so the frontend can show the user what game they have saved or loaded and about to run. It also does autorun, so you could insert it and have it immediately boot straight into the game. Not on by default, of course.
I lastly want to put in input remapping ala Steam Input and have an overlay or "Xbox Guide" style flyout when pressing a home button of sorts. The great news is all of this has been done by another project known as OpenGamepadUI, which also runs using Godot. I have proof that it works, which is how I even decided to use Godot for this in the first place.
That was a lot of words, but surprisingly there was a lot of context and features to go over!
ChunkOfWax
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this is extremely, extremely cool. awesome stuff :)
