About HTPC.ninja…
Hi there, this is Dave speaking…
I’ve been a PlayStation user since its debut in the 90s (yes, I’m getting old as s*it) and I had all the consoles from the first PS1 to the latest PS5.
I’ve always been a kind of “fan boy” when it comes to the Sony gaming platform, it never disappointed me, especially for the games catalog and I never thought about switching or even actually looking at what the alternatives are and what those have to offer.
Moreover, I never conceived the PC as a gaming platform but only as a work instrument, because when I want to relax and enjoy a game I wanna to do it on my couch, using only a gamepad and enjoying the content on a big TV with ease.
In the last year or so however I started to watch several game plays on YouTube of games I use(d) to play on the PS5, but since most of those are natively cross platform or anyhow available on PC as well (since Sony exclusives are by now only temporary!), I noticed how better the games look on PC and started to get “annoyed” by that. They look sharper, more detailed and way more fluid and I started longing for that quality level.
Furthermore on PC the gaming experience is highly customizable, differently from a console where you can just choose between “quality” or “performance” (mind the quotes!).
Quality aside, the content of titles available on PC is massive (only Nintendo’s ips are still missing by now) and there are some games I would like to play which are not still available on console like Last Epoch *. On top of that there are emulators so you can play old titles you loved in your childhood, game mods and more!
So what? I’ve started thinking about the feasibility to build a “console-like PC”, with a small form factor, with the possibility to turn it on using just a gamepad and having an easy to use UI like a PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo. So I’ve started googling something like “console like pc” and the first results were related to how to setup Windows in order to skip the login
(or better to automatically logging in) and to utilize the “big picture mode” of Steam by configuring the app to launch automatically on startup.
Another UI alternative for Windows that I found is Playnite, which basically provides a richer experience compared to the steam app by adding more customization and support for emulators and so on.
But by looking at some youtube videos, such options didn’t look like the smooth experience I was looking and hoping for, because at the end of the day you were still able too see Windows user avatar and the desktop before actually entering steam and whole experience looks somehow “forced” **.
Then I found a couple of really interesting Linux projects (by the way, I like Linux and I’ve utilized it for my daily job for quite a few years, while I really don’t like windows and I left it after windows XP!):
ChimeraOS and Bazzite.
The promise and claims of such projects were exactly what I was looking for: bring the console experience to the PC, by being able to play whatever you like with whatever controller on (mostly) whatever hardware in the coziness of your couch.
So, after further reading and watching videos, it turned out that Bazzite was the way to go! (most active development and community and most features reach project). Once checked the feasibility of the project I had in mind from a software perspective, my focus then moved on how to craft a machine having a size comparable to the one of a PS5 or Xbox series X, the same “sobriety” (I hate dumb rainbow RGB lights and stuff like that 😀 ) and noiselessness, but also way more power and flexibility.
A very hard and ambitious goal, especially considering that I never built a PC before!
But, after studying the topic for a while, it turned out that is not that hard even for a newbie if he has the right amount of “nerdiness” and the willingness to learn and try (and if you are reading this, you can make it).
That said is not even as easy as playing with Lego as someone wants you make you believe, because if you do the wrong thing you can destroy hundreds or thousands of hardware, so you have to be careful and take your time to get it right!
So… long story short I’ve build my “dream machine” and I felt the need of sharing my experience and gathered knoledge, thus this site has born.
I hope you’ll find it useful and that it will save you precious time.
* Eventually I tried Last Epoch and I was very disappointed LOL
** Once built my console I had a temporary change of mind and I’ve actually bought a Windows 11 license (I swear) and I tried to use it with a heavy customization using the unattended.xml descriptor to remove Microsoft bulls*its, but the experience was traumatic nevertheless so I reinstalled Bazzite the day after!