Two machines with clear jobs: a desktop gaming PC for the serious sessions, and a compact PC under the living-room TV that dual-boots CachyOS for couch gaming and Batocera for the retro consoles — with the retro collection living mostly on the NAS so it survives anything done to either box.
The desk machine is the powerhouse: Windows, a proper GPU, and the demanding titles. It reports its vitals — CPU and GPU load, temperatures, power draw — to a Home Assistant dashboard page that only appears while the machine is actually up, and the living-room TV can wake it and switch straight to its input with one button, thanks to a set of input scripts that took some patience to make HDMI-CEC behave.
Under the television sits a compact Minisforum box with two personalities on its boot menu: CachyOS — a performance-tuned Arch — for controller-first couch gaming, and Batocera for when the evening calls for a CRT filter and something from 1994. It shares the TV with the consoles and the Apple TV, each one button away on the same CEC-tamed input scripts.
A variety of ROMs, saves and artwork spanning the cartridge and disc eras
lives split across two homes: the larger disc-based systems on the NAS, served
over NFS and symlinked into the TV PC’s Batocera
/userdata, and the smaller latency-sensitive systems
on the box’s local NVMe. The payoff is that the library is independent of the
machine: distro hops, reinstalls and disk swaps leave the collection untouched,
and the NAS backup chain protects the save files.
The full walkthrough, including the permissions that silently break saves and the boot hook that changed between Batocera versions, is the site’s original guide: Batocera ROMs on a NAS over NFS.
The desktop PC doubles as the house’s game-streaming source: Moonlight carries play sessions to the laptop and other screens around the home, so a demanding title can be played from the sofa while the frames are rendered at the desk.