Written to be read in order — each part assumes the one before it.
- 1 The whole picture: a Pi, a Hetzner box, and a tailnet A retro machine shouldn't be a pile of hand-edited configs you're afraid to touch. Here's the system I built so mine rebuilds itself. 2026·07 · 4 min
- 2 It has to feel like a console Installing RetroArch gets you a computer with an emulator on it. The console is everything between the power coming on and the first game starting. 2026·07 · 8 min
- 3 The library lives elsewhere The VM owns the ROMs, the metadata and the box art. The console mirrors that library onto its own disk, so a rebuild restores everything and a game never waits on the network to load. 2026·07 · 6 min
- 4 Saves follow you Saves and savestates are written to a store on the VM, over the tailnet and conflict-aware. The console holds nothing you would lose, and nothing goes to a third party. 2026·07 · 6 min
- 5 Run the toy like prod A headless console fails silently. Its logs and metrics ship to the same Grafana as the server, so a dead service becomes a Telegram message instead of a mystery. 2026·07 · 7 min