The team behind EmuDeck, a project that started off to provide easy emulation on Steam Deck / SteamOS have announced their own hardware with the Bazzite Linux powered EmuDeck Machines.
The 8600G is quite a leap ahead of the Steam Deck in terms of performance and architecture. But of course you can just take the steam deck with you and play on the go or in bed ;)
I like the idea of a plug-and-play emulation station in a retro-styled case, but that case design is copyright infringement territory. Emulation devices are on shaky enough legal ground as it is, we do not need to tempt fate
OS wise this is ready to go, my main concern is that their emu deck project is written in a way that needs KDE to be fully functional. Hopefully this is just because is started out as a steam deck app and isn't inexperience.
The old frontends like Hyperspin and Launchbox were similar in that they were developed in such a way it really limited where those projects could go, as such the retro frontends for Linux have been pretty limited.
Be really cool to see them expand Emu deck into a standalone program, it's even cooler that we're seeing the intention of Ublue already allowing people to achieve their goals.
Well, there are already great emulators for nearly every console on Linux, all you need to do, is create a full screen app, that is controlled by controller, where you pick your games
And the hardware, of course, but this is mostly of the shelf as well, I would say