My Budget Emulation PC

Six months ago, the following video was suggested to me by YouTube:

I couldn't help but feel inspired to take on the challenge of creating my own budget Steambox/Emulation PC, but I was still at my last job and funds were just too tight.

As time went on and I started my new job, I couldn't shake this idea of buying up an old office computer and turning it into a gaming machine. So, I began looking on eBay until I found exactly what I wanted: an HP EliteDesk 750 with 16 GB of RAM, a 256 GB hard drive, and a Ryzen 5 Pro 2400G it would make for the perfect tiny computer that I could easily hook up in my living room.

I spent $80 on the computer and another $40 on the power supply. I also had to pick up at $10 display port to HDMI adapter for a grand total of $130 for my new machine.

This past weekend, I finally sat down and started working on putting this altogether. I downloaded Bazzite, and used Etcher to flash it to a drive. I popped it into my new HP and let it do its thing. The installation took a little longer than I expected, but I'd say it was completely installed within thirty minutes or so.

I've never used Bazzite before, but I knew of its reputation for being a very nice looking Linux distro that could be navigated with a Playstation controller, which is what I wanted. I own consoles and as much as I'd like to buy a gaming rig, I just cannot afford one right now, and quite frankly, I don't need one. But I do play a lot of older games, especially from the PS2/Xbox - PS3/Xbox 360 era, and some of those games are hard to find or extremely expensive to buy. I pick up remastered versions where I can, but licensing agreements prevent a lot of games that I enjoyed from ever being released again. Games like Scarface, The Godfather, NHL Hitz, and NFL 2k.

It took me around half an hour to really get the flow of Bazzite, but once I did things were smooth sailing. I began moving my games over from my PC, I hooked up my Dual Shock controller and started playing. The system was able to handle all of the PS2 games with ease, and it looks good while doing it. The only issue... and I'm sure most of you will see this coming, but I just don't have enough space. That 256 GB filled up fast.

I ended up uninstalling my Steam games and as many emulators as I could. I have a sneaking suspicion there is some more stuff within Bazzite I can uninstall, but I haven't had the time to explore that too much. I'm also hoping to test out how PS2 roms will run off a flash drive.

For now, my little emulator box is going to be a solely a PS2 emulation station which is really the reason I did this to begin with. Once storage prices drop some, I'll expand the storage and maybe tinker a little on the inside. But for now, I'm happy booting up my system and reliving so many of my favorite games with relative ease.