Three machines with clear jobs: a desktop gaming PC for the serious sessions, a compact PC under the living-room TV that dual-boots CachyOS for couch gaming and Batocera for the retro consoles, and a Strix Halo laptop for playing in bed — with the retro collection living mostly on the NAS so it survives anything done to any of them.
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. An HDMI 2.1 switch routes the card between the monitor and the TV, and both operating systems renegotiate HDR and refresh rate correctly whichever way it is thrown.
Two personalities on one boot menu: CachyOS — a performance-tuned Arch — boots straight into Steam’s controller-first Big Picture for the sofa, and Batocera is there for when the evening calls for a CRT filter. Home Assistant treats it as a single switch: on wakes it, sets the receiver and the TV to its input; off shuts it down cleanly and turns the screen off behind it. 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 third machine has the softest seat in the house. Most sessions run natively on the laptop itself — the 8060S is powerful enough to carry a large share of the Steam library on its own panel, no host required — so games in bed need nothing else switched on. The streaming path is there for the titles that want the desktop’s card: Sunshine on the host and Moonlight on the laptop carry a session in 10-bit HDR at 1440p, frames rendered at the desk, played from under the covers.