I finally finished my project: an emulation console for the kids

The Mrs is happy I won’t be spending so long in the garage now. It’s ended up being bigger than I thought and is a huge eyesore, but it works fine.

My kids are playing a lot of video games these days. They play a few indie games and Nintendo Switch games. I wanted to give them their own device, but wanted to stay on a low budget in this PC hardware pricing environment. So I thought I would make a poor man’s Steam machine/Gabe cube. I took inspiration from this YouTube video about making a broken laptop into a media PC. So I bought a broken laptop (smashed screen and dented case). Got it pretty cheap in an eBay auction (HP ENVY 17-da0503sa - Intel Core Ultra 5 125H - 16GB DDR5 RAM). Took the working parts out and made a case for it.

I wanted to increase the TDP to its full potential and add a cooling mod to make it silent. Unfortunately the machine wouldn’t start properly without the original fan attached and the TDP was hardware locked. Noisy fan curves were also hardware locked. In any case, I got Bazzite on it and it seems to run their indie PC games and Switch emulated games at 60 FPS fine. Half pleased and half disappointed, but using it for now. Might upgrade in the future and make this a server PC instead, but it is working for its intended purpose for now. I need to push some metal mesh across the front to finish up. I’ve been a PC gamer for a long time and I’m enjoying doing some couch gaming with split screen Mario Kart 8.