Need help building a virtual enviroment where students can game easily

Operating Systems & Open Source Windows
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To keep it very short, I work at a small school, its owner bought an old Xbox 360 so the kids would have a video game to play before and after classes, but it stopped working after a few months.
I had the idea that I could use an old laptop that I have to stream my gaming PC at home through Parsec so that they could have access to more modern games, and my gaming PC would have an use as I’m currently working most of the time.

But I didn’t think it was a very exciting idea to have kids accessing Windows folders so they could play their games, I wanted some interface that would let them choose their games with their joysticks, switch games with their joysticks, all in a quick manner without having them ever know they’re just gaming on a PC with Windows in it.

The best I could come up with to this moment is Playnite; it’s very easy to put my games with its beautiful covers on it… But it lacks some of my needs, such as going back to the games screen to switch through games easily; the Xbox they had with digital games in it, all they had to do was press the menu button and go back to the select games screen. Playnite doesn’t currently have that. It also has cracks in it, for example kids can control their joystics to access a menu that can close the program, or even shut down the system, and as I’m now the only one pretty much in charge of keeping the video games running, if I’m not around, the PC will stay ‘broken’ until I open the program, or turn on the PC again. Another big problem is when some games take a little while to load, Playnite gets minimized, but then goes back on screen while the game is loading, the kid doesn’t get what’s going on, presses the game several times, then we have the game running on multiple instances, or worse, an error message popping up on screen that can’t be closed with their joysticks.

I came with ideas such as making a shortcut on the controller with joy-to-key like softwares, so for example the menu button will be “Alt” and right trigger will be “F4’“, I teach that shortcut to the kids telling that they just need to press it to switch games and that’s a solution, but it also has problems such as some games, like Rocket League not allowing ALT+F4 for some reason, and of course, the trouble of them may attempting to do it on the Playnite window, closing it, and ‘breaking’ their ‘video game’.

As you can tell, those ideas are pretty shoddy, and I feel like I’m patching things in an ineffective way. I would very much appreciate ideas so I can have the students gaming without me worrying that “man, if the kid press X button, my plan is going to break”.

A friend told me Linux would make a better system for the idea, and I’m really not tech savy at all, but if it’s really the best way to do it, I wouldn’t have a problem giving it a go.

I really appreciate the patience for reading through all of that, and would appreciate your ideas even more, and am looking foward to it. Thanks in advance, everyone!

2 Likes
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Maybe not quite the same as what you are looking for, but for your situation the easiest path I see is using Steam in Big Picture mode, installed on a new Windows user that has no admin rights, that you’d leave open and running when you leave home.

It has controller support, looks console-ish enough to pick up immediately, kids can install/uninstall games without admin on the system, it doesn’t affect your files or saves of your own games, and you can probably hack together a solution to make sure Steam is always running, in case the kids close it.

All of this running through the streaming setup you were already proposing with Parsec.

It’s not the most professional solution, but I think it’s realistic to put it together in an afternoon and get some feeling on how well it works :thinking:

3

Thanks for the reply!

I have tried using Steam Big Picture before, I’d say one of the catches it had, when comparing to Playnite, was the personalization of game covers for non-Steam games. Playnite has a pretty easy way to put a cover on the games, while I struggled a bit at it with Steam, though I don’t remember exactly made me turn my face to it.

The children being able to install/uninstall is also a con, to my point of view, as they’re not supposed to uninstall the games.

But you did touch an important solution when you talked about keeping it running, even when they close it.

GPT told me of a code that I can get running on Windows so the program comes back up once it’s closed, but I’m currently not being able to execute it properly.

The code he sent me is:

@echo off
:loop
tasklist | find /i “Playnite.FullscreenApp.exe” >nul
if errorlevel 1 (
start “” “C:\Users\SCHOOL_KIDS\AppData\Local\Playnite\Playnite.FullscreenApp.exe”
)
timeout /t 2 >nul
goto loop

When I tried to execute it through a bat file I got an error message telling me that Windows couldn’t find it, I already checked the path multiple times and it is correct, so I’m wondering the error isn’t elsewhere on the code.

Also, as for my game saves, no need to worry about it; most games (and I think all of the ones I have) have their save folders auto-create on the Windows disk directory, so all I had to do to keep it separate was creating other Windows user for them.

Once again, thank you for your reply!

1 Like
4

Ah, i assumed the opposite here, sorry.

Then my first idea would be to set that account as a “child” in a family. That way they can only play the games you set, have time limits, and so on.

On the script, i don’t have a Windows machine right now to test but the logic seems alright to me. Maybe try with ‘@echo on’ and check the output, most likely GPT can help you as well, if you provide the output of that, it can usually do fine on small scripts like this.

…and now you’ve made me want to try out Playnite, I don’t think i’ve ever tried it :thinking:

Glad to help!

5

Customisation can be done in the regular (Windowed) Client if you right click on a blank picture space in Steam for third party games. If you want to customize every view, you need, I think, 2 different sizes for the games (small and wider version which is used as “last run” pic in big picture mode) a background picture for the header, a logo and an icon.

You can find sets for popular / emulator / third party games or alternatives for steam games on https://www.steamgriddb.com/ This site also provides a plugin for your browser so you can click a “+” icon on the site and select a game you want to apply the graphics to.

On a other sidenote: A used last gen console (Playstation 4 or Xbox One) can be had for really cheap and are much more reliable compared to the “bump gate” generation (Fat Xbox360, Fat PS3), or you could use a used slim successor (Xbox 360 slim, or Slim PS3) - If you go 360 slim you could reuse the controllers. This would involve spending money but this would also be the case if you setup a terminal (to your gaming PC) as replacement + Controller. This would also reduce the points of failure (your ISP connection, school ISP connection, keeping the gaming PC running and making sure the screen is turned on, tunnel / vpn connection to your PC, third party streaming provider which could fail etc.)