This is fantastic and should be on the list of "Things to do with an old laptop."

Thanks!

Would love to see a video of the laptop booting and running a game

Or at least a photo.

It's a poor quality recording, but here it is https://perso.pw/solene/pc.mp4

It's a poor quality recording, but here it is https://perso.pw/solene/pc.mp4

> To achieve a more children-proof environment, I decided to run Retroarch directly from a TTY, without a graphical server.

I'd love to read more about getting that up.

It could be rendering directly to the framebuffer (e.g. `mpv playthisfromtty.mp4`).

Or they mean they used pure X (e.g. `startx`) and added a decent v-sync compositor such as picom.

it's directly using the framebuffer without X or Wayland involved. This is possible because of the SDL backend

You would like to see more specific instructions for the setup?

arcade machine parts are tough stuff, if you need a physically durable setup.

they seem to cost 3-6$ usd each,

I would want to use Wayland, though, for the Vsync and other things. I seem to have a better experience with emulation that way.

Is there a way to boot something like Retroarch directly via Wayland using wlroots or something?