So I am exploring my options for an idea I had. I'll be testing this at home but the idea in the long run is to help set this up for an after school program I'm pitching to the local school district to be run at the public library who have a room for these kinds of activities.
The goal here is to have a server that handles the heavy lifting creating and running virtual machines, then connecting via wifi from very basic minimum spec chromebooks with a USB controller plugged into it so a student can go sit in the comfy chairs in the library hangout space, and maybe in cases where we want two player stuff available, connecting that chromebook to a TV or monitor via hdmi at one of the stations set up for that.
The goal is to have a decently powerful system that can run multiple instances of virtual machines, the chromebook or whatever device would be set up to log in over the local network into the virtual machines, they are just thin clients, and I'd like it to boot directly into the emulator environment rather than running a whole windows instance on top of the emulator, or at the most having it run a much lighter linux build made for the emulator so we keep the server overhead down.
The VM's would be set up to look to a directory on the server for the roms so I wont have to clone the whole catalogue for each VM.
Id like the devices that are in the hands of the kiddos to be those cheap but durable chromebooks that schools were handing out for a while. I can get them for pretty darn cheap and they should serve fine as a thin client even if they are on the older side.
The server Im going to test with is my home machine, a base model dell t450 running windows server 2019. 32gb ecc ram, xeon e-5-2630 v3, a set of 8 600gb sas drives, and I plan to install an NVIDIA Quadro P4000 unless I can source something better. Unfortunately I dont have any more budget for this personally and I don't think my project is going to get any actual funding from the school so it's all out of pocket.
The after school program will probably be using the same machine, I'll either donate mine to them and they can maybe pay in to add some more ram and a decent graphics card if needed, or they might have something similar in a closet for their computer courses, don't know yet.
It would mostly be emulating classic systems, one of the uses will be to let students who are learning to make their own games in the highschool elective coding class bring copies of their games built to run on whatever system (they have been building for game boy advanced for the last few years) and add them to the server directory so others can play and test, however it will also be available for the after school thing where they can earn time to play other things from the game library by turning in bonus assignments or earning rewards from school programs, and the teachers will send over a weekly update on who earned how many points, and points turn into play time on this machine as well as the arcade cabinets Im building or personal time on the 3d printer and so on.
Would batocera be what I'm looking for here or do you think another system would be better suited for this kind of project?
I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions, I have only just begun planning here, so I am sure I am either missing things or might even be on the wrong track entirely to get to the end goal.