I don't know if this is the best place to post this but whatever. About 6 months ago I decided to do a complete rebuild of my arcade system, at the time it was running in a 4 player cabinet I built in my basement on an old core 2 duo system I threw together with parts I had laying around. It was great for a while but I craved to have something a little more portable and something I could use in my living room hooked up to my TV. I scrapped the old system and bought parts for a new X99 micro atx haswell system and a couple of wireless xbox 360 controllers and started from scratch.
I want to share my experience with this build as I am getting close to "completing" it and at some point organize info into a guide. My main goal was to build a media center/gaming system in one that is portable, resolution independent and also since I wanted to serve media and games, off load storage or roms and media to a NAS server.
Here are the main software components that make up this build:
Media Center/Gaming System
Kodi (XBMC)
Launcher4Kodi - a Kodi shelling app
AdvancedLauncher - Kodi plugin for launching external apps
Hyperspin
Steam Big Picture
RocketLauncher
Network Drive to Freenas CIFS share
OpenVPN client
NAS Server
FreeNAS - NAS operating system based on FreeBSD
OpenVPN
CIFS Service - FreeNAS service for windows shares
How it works:
Kodi is the main front end that I use, Hyperspin and Steam are secondary. Using Launcher4Kodi I shelled Kodi to start with the computer instead of explorer so it boots into Kodi instead of the desktop. I used the Advanced Launcher plugin for Kodi to add menu items to the home screen to launch Steam Big Picture and Hyperspin. For the most part all my roms, movies, music, pictures and saves live on the NAS server. I setup a network drive that connects to a CIFS share on my NAS server so windows just sees it as another hard drive. RocketLauncher is configured to point to all my roms on the network drive so I am launching roms directly from the NAS server unless they are in an archive that needs to be extracted. My newest addition is OpenVPN which runs in a jail in FreeNAS and allows me to take my system to work or a friends house and connect to my network and in turn the network drive I have setup. I will be configuring the vpn client to login automatically when windows starts once I get a couple of routing issues figured out.
There has been a lot of little issues that I have had to iron out in order to get everything working seamlessly, I have some notes I need to organize and then I will throw together a guide. The only downside to this setup is that you need a network connection, preferably not wireless but it will do the job, hell what doesn't require a network connection now days anyways. Ill post some pics or a video or two of it in action when I have some time, didn't spend a lot of time on detail, just wanted to share for now.
I want to share my experience with this build as I am getting close to "completing" it and at some point organize info into a guide. My main goal was to build a media center/gaming system in one that is portable, resolution independent and also since I wanted to serve media and games, off load storage or roms and media to a NAS server.
Here are the main software components that make up this build:
Media Center/Gaming System
Kodi (XBMC)
Launcher4Kodi - a Kodi shelling app
AdvancedLauncher - Kodi plugin for launching external apps
Hyperspin
Steam Big Picture
RocketLauncher
Network Drive to Freenas CIFS share
OpenVPN client
NAS Server
FreeNAS - NAS operating system based on FreeBSD
OpenVPN
CIFS Service - FreeNAS service for windows shares
How it works:
Kodi is the main front end that I use, Hyperspin and Steam are secondary. Using Launcher4Kodi I shelled Kodi to start with the computer instead of explorer so it boots into Kodi instead of the desktop. I used the Advanced Launcher plugin for Kodi to add menu items to the home screen to launch Steam Big Picture and Hyperspin. For the most part all my roms, movies, music, pictures and saves live on the NAS server. I setup a network drive that connects to a CIFS share on my NAS server so windows just sees it as another hard drive. RocketLauncher is configured to point to all my roms on the network drive so I am launching roms directly from the NAS server unless they are in an archive that needs to be extracted. My newest addition is OpenVPN which runs in a jail in FreeNAS and allows me to take my system to work or a friends house and connect to my network and in turn the network drive I have setup. I will be configuring the vpn client to login automatically when windows starts once I get a couple of routing issues figured out.
There has been a lot of little issues that I have had to iron out in order to get everything working seamlessly, I have some notes I need to organize and then I will throw together a guide. The only downside to this setup is that you need a network connection, preferably not wireless but it will do the job, hell what doesn't require a network connection now days anyways. Ill post some pics or a video or two of it in action when I have some time, didn't spend a lot of time on detail, just wanted to share for now.
