Any potential for Chromebox as RetroArch Box?

RetroArch General
#1

I saw this(http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/04/asus-chromebox/) on Engadget and the first thing I thought about was a nice cheap box for Retroarch. Sure, you’d have to ditch Chrome OS, and it’s not the most powerful thing in the world, but it should be able to handle classic emulation pretty well.

Musing a bit, I’d love to one day see a dedicated Retroarch OS that you could load on a machine like this and would just work. Sorta like what the Retropie project has done with Raspberry Pi. A non-nonsense box that gets me right to doing what I want to do: play classic games.

Now, back to reality. Does a box like this have any potential? Or would we better off sticking to something like the Ouya, Raspberry Pi, Wii, HTPC for our classic gaming needs?

#2

I think Chrome devices typically have a locked bootloader to prevent people from just buying the cheap hardware and slapping another OS on it. That said, someone did quite a bit of work toward getting RetroArch working under Native Client (NaCl), which would allow it to work natively in ChromeOS.

With an i3 in there, the only real difference between that little guy and any other small, build-it-yourself HTPC is the price (that is, the Chromebox is super-cheap; small cases often cost nearly that much).

#3

Actually the newer x86 Chromebooks have a legacy BIOS boot mode you can enable to install other Linux distros: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ac … ng_SeaBIOS

Only issue is they show an annoying warning message on every boot when you enable this, and you have to press Ctrl+D or wait 30 seconds for it to go away.

I imagine this new Chromebox would have something similar, but I’d check before buying to make sure.