I used to be a casual gamer before I got married and then I didn't have time and sold all my games and systems off or they died. Fast forward a few years and I have a few kids who really want to play video games. We however don't want them glued to the boob-tube all day long so we don't own any game systems. Or I should say we haven't bought them one, though they are welcome to earn the money and buy it themselves but they end up buying other things. Anyway, they see friends playing them and want to play something as well.
RetroPi
I looked up some emulators and thought about just doing that but it didn't have the video game feel to it if it were just on a keyboard. Then I stumbled onto RetroPi, the OS for a RaspberryPi, which I already had laying around. With it you can put video game ROMs on it for all kinds of older game systems and play. Still on a keyboard though. So the RaspberryPi ends up being the game system. Kinda cool.
With a little more searching I found a guy made a tutorial to take an off brand wired XBOX 360 controller and replace some of the insides with a RaspberryPi Zero, which is a smaller RaspberryPi. It still has the GPI slots for pins so you can solder the wires from the buttons to the pins for the controls. You also have to do some magic with power from a USB / HDMI adapter.
This was a huge hit while my kids were 6 and younger, but after a year or so the remote was dropped too many times and broke. So we took a break from video games for awhile.
Mac Mini / PS4 Remotes
The kids eventually wanted to play games again so I thought about it. I had an old Mac Mini I had been using for a Plex Server until it got too slow so I had to upgrade to a Western Digital NAS drive. I took that Mac mini and threw on some game emulators for Mac. The Mac was better than the raspberry pi because it had more RAM but was still old so I could only put games that were N64 or earlier. Anything after that, and even that, would play very slowly.\n" +
My oldest son loved playing Super Smash Bros. Even though it was painfully slow to me. He didn’t know so he loved it. My wife would also play if we did Mario Kart or Super Mario Bros.
At least a year or two later I found and old MacBook Air that was working fine besides a cracked screen. I moved everything over there and connected it to the TV as it’s monitor and now we could play things without the lag and slowness.
Somewhere in the middle there I worked out that PS4 remotes are Bluetooth and can connect directly to my computers. I bought two and set them up for the boys on our emulator and it’s been a blast since. The boys really have gotten into playing Golden Eye. I showed them the old tricks I knew and even found a bunch of cheats to make big heads and whatnot. They thought that was amazing.
CloneHero
At some point in time I remembered the old game GuitarHero. My wife and I talked about it and she said she’d play a game like that with good music. Challenge accepted!
I first was looking to see if I could just emulate it somehow. I did find some things to do that but not very fun without the guitar. Just using a keyboard would be lame.
Then I found CloneHero. Some awesome person or people developed a clone of GuitarHero but made it open source so if you wanted you could take a song, make a button chart for it and people could download it and play your song. Tons of songs not from GuitarHero or Rock Band were added. Also, you can connect guitar controllers to it with Bluetooth or cord and play it how it should be played.
To do this I had to pull down the code repository and install some things to get the Wii Guitar controller connected to my MacBook Air. Once I got it I found it was AWESOME! I downloaded a ton of songs and got the kids into it. We’d do family nights playing CloneHero.
The same problem happened again, things started to slow down after the app had been running for awhile, which would cause lag and make the game unplayable until I restarted it again. So to fix that I had to move CloneHero to my personal MacBook Pro. It runs great there but not the setup I’d like to have on my personal computer.
From this and talking with friends I was able to get old unused GuitarHero and Rock Band equipment. I have yet to crack how to connect GuitarHero brand 6 button guitars and drum controllers that have Bluetooth built in. I even bought some app for my Mac to help but it does nothing and there is no support from the dev that made it.