I’m looking for some advice on setting up a retro gaming system for my son. He absolutely loves the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and some Atari classics like Frogger. The problem I have is he is autistic, which leads to two very different issues to solve. First is he loves to tinker with things. Which I don’t mind, and actively encourage in kids because that's how you learn. However, when he breaks something, it can cause full blown meltdowns. Like you would think the end of the world is coming level meltdowns. Therefore, things like the Nintendo Switch are great because there is not much he can do in the settings. Especially, with the built-in parent controls. However, when I’ve tried setting him up with a laptop with Retro Arch, he will jack with the settings and break it in a matter of minutes.
I’d like to figure out something I can plug into a TV that will allow him to play retro games, preferably with a wireless controller (because I’ll be damned if I can get him to sit still why playing Sonic). The best solution I’ve used in the past was a Nvidia Shield TV running Arch Browser. He still managed to factory reset once, but outside of that it worked well. However, the fact that it is a full streaming/media system is overkill for what I’m looking for. Plus, I really don’t like the direction it has been heading with the built-in ads and other Google crap.
I looked into the Sega Genesis mini, but they are selling for more than a Shield TV and have wired controllers. I have an Atari flashback, but it is crap with it's IR controllers. Whoever though of that obviously has never tried to get a child to maintain line of sight while playing a game.
So, I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestion for hardware/software that will allow for the playing of retro games on a TV, but also have a way of either preventing tampering with settings, making it more difficult to get to the settings, or even something that can be reset and configured with a few clicks. I’d love to be able to tell him, look if you mess it up just reboot and it will reset.
In most modern Linux distributions, you could preconfigure retroarch and whatever else first, then set the filesystem to read-only, while mounting an overlay filesystem on top that is discarded at reboot.
The idea would be no matter how hard he breaks it, he shouldn't have Root's password and therefore cannot disable overlayfs
Look for the overlayroot package in whatever Linux distro you're most comfortable with.
That's a great point.
Tos possibly save OP a few steps, https://batocera.org is a RetroPie fork that mounts the OS read-only by default. So the kid could still tinker with some lighter settings that save back to a different file system share, but any unrecoverable settings changes are prevented.
I wasn't aware you could do that. I obviously, didn't give him root access, but I also didn't lock it down enough to prevent him from still breaking it. This sounds like a good quick solution.