Bigbox with Nvidia Shield TV and Gamestream?

[dmaker]

Does anyone use this? 

A couple of months ago I replaced my gaming laptop with a newer one. The old is still pretty decent, core-i7, 32 GB RAM, 2x128GB PCI SSD (used to be in RAID0), 1TB SATA SSD, Nvidia GTX980M, so I left Launchbox installed and popped a usb cooling pad under it and stuck it in my TV cabinet and connected the hdmi to the tv. This works fine, except Windows is exceptionally bad at trying to be an HTPC where you want minimal mouse usage. Switching between apps like Kodi, Netflix, Youtube, and Launchbox/Bigbox was super annoying and not very wife friendly. 

So this weekend I decided to try Batocera. I had to break the Intel Rapid Storage RAID and installed Batocera on one of the 128GB PCI SSD and selected the 1TB SATA SSD for internal storage for Batocera. My biggest issue now is my mame collections needs some serious curating as there are way, way too many duplicates, but also I cannot seem to find a controller sweet spot. I have tried a PS4 controller and the Shield TV gamepad. Both work, but with issues. The Shield controller was working pretty well but it does not work at all with the pre-installed Kodi that comes with Batocera. The PS4 works great (both games and Kodi) when it feels like it, other times it's completely laggy and will stick on certain presses rendering it useless. 

So now I am thinking I will just stream Bigbox from my new laptop. It has an RTX 2070 and as mentioned I also have an Nvidia Shield connected to my TV. So I set it up last night and it was working great until I tried to play a game. So I guess what I am wondering is how do you get the Nvidia Shield gamepad that is connected to the Shield to work in emulators when using Gamestream? I cannot launch a game, all I seem to be able to do is browse my collection when using Gamestream. 

 

If I can't get Batocera working the way I want, I think I might just install ESXi 7 standalone, create a Windows 10 vm and passthrough the gpu and see how that goes and then go back to using Window and Launchbox

 

If anyone does use Gamestream with Bigbox, I would love to hear how you handle this.

Side note: if anyone knows of a good tool to help trim a mameset, that would be awesome. Doing it manually (with 37K files) is not all that feasible. All I really want are playable US versions of games. 

Thank you.

 

 

Edited June 21, 2021 by dmaker

[dmaker]

Actually, a new idea popped into my head. If I install ESXi 7 standalone on the laptop and create a Win10 vm and successully passthrough the GTX 980M, then I could potentially use that for Gamestreaming Bigbox via the ShieldTV...? I would have to figure out how to control an actual emulator, though. 

But if I could get this working, I could then move the ESX-laptop to my basement server room (i.e. a tiny rack in root cellar where everything is gigabit wired connected throughout the house and keeps everything nice and cool), and would not need to have it running in my upstairs living room and hdmi connected to the TV.

That would be ideal. I ordered a USB3 to gigabit ethernet adapter from Amazon since ESX will not recognize the killer nic in the laptop. that adapter will arrive sometime today...  I'd be happy to run Bigbox on a VM and Gamestream it via my Shield. It would be nice if I didn't have to passthrough the whole gpu, but I don't think that would really work as Windows will need to recognize it as an Nvidia gpu for Geforce to install. Just using the shared "3d accleration" in ESX would not fit that bill as the gpu will show up as SVGA3D or some such. This is fine for creating vm's with generic D3D and OGL, but not for something like Gamestream.

 

Or I could just not bother with ESX at all and just re-install Windows on the laptop and do the Gamestreaming that way too. The original thought was that I would create a few vm's on the laptop that could benefit from generic acceleration vs my rack mounted ESX server in my basement that has no gpu to speak of. Hence providing a somewhat more responsive desktop for some virtual machines, but it's not terribly important. 

[faeran]

1 hour ago, dmaker said:

Actually, a new idea popped into my head. If I install ESXi 7 standalone on the laptop and create a Win10 vm and successully passthrough the GTX 980M, then I could potentially use that for Gamestreaming Bigbox via the ShieldTV...? I would have to figure out how to control an actual emulator, though. 

But if I could get this working, I could then move the ESX-laptop to my basement server room (i.e. a tiny rack in root cellar where everything is gigabit wired connected throughout the house and keeps everything nice and cool), and would not need to have it running in my upstairs living room and hdmi connected to the TV.

That would be ideal. I ordered a USB3 to gigabit ethernet adapter from Amazon since ESX will not recognize the killer nic in the laptop. that adapter will arrive sometime today...  I'd be happy to run Bigbox on a VM and Gamestream it via my Shield. It would be nice if I didn't have to passthrough the whole gpu, but I don't think that would really work as Windows will need to recognize it as an Nvidia gpu for Geforce to install. Just using the shared "3d accleration" in ESX would not fit that bill as the gpu will show up as SVGA3D or some such. This is fine for creating vm's with generic D3D and OGL, but not for something like Gamestream.

 

Or I could just not bother with ESX at all and just re-install Windows on the laptop and do the Gamestreaming that way too. The original thought was that I would create a few vm's on the laptop that could benefit from generic acceleration vs my rack mounted ESX server in my basement that has no gpu to speak of. Hence providing a somewhat more responsive desktop for some virtual machines, but it's not terribly important. 

No matter which way you end up going, I'm interested to know the results of all of it and how it works out for ya.

[dmaker]

I'm in the process of re-installing Windows on the old gaming laptop. If I am going to try to use Gamestream, then I am going to need Windows to see a full Nvidia gpu, not a generic one that ESX would provide, without gpu passthrough. Using gpu passthrough will lock up that whole gpu for that single vm, thus making any other vm's created on that laptop unable to even use the generic 3D acceleration. So not really much point in going that route. 

My current plan is to finish the Windows 10 install, restore Launchbox from a backup and see about using Gamestream while the laptop sits in my basement (but using gigabit wired connection to same LAN as the Shield TV). 

I am still going to have to figure out how to actually control an emulator once using Gamestream. Not really sure about that part. If at some point I need to just bring the laptop back upstairs and into the TV cabinet and connect it to the TV via HDMI, then so be it. That makes controlling Bigbox simple as I have several bluetooth controllers that I could use. The Nvidia gamepad is great for this purpose and if I can't get this to work the way I want it to with Gamestream, then I will not really need that gamepad for my Shield. I don't game directly on the Shield as a decent front end for emulators is non existent on Android TV platform. So it might as well get connected back to the Windows 10 machine running Bigbox. 

This is mostly for fun/POC   We only have the one TV and I rarely get alone time with it anyway    Most of my Launchbox gaming is done on my current laptop. I just thought I would try and create some sort of dedicated retro gaming console out of the previous laptop, but Batocera was a giant headache to setup and very flaky in my short experience. 

 

 

 

[dmaker]

If all else fails, I can always just figure out how to use Gamestream and Bigbox with my current laptop and the ShieldTV. 

 

I'm just trying to find some sort of fun purpose for my previous laptop as the specs are more than enough to run some decent emulators. 

[dmaker]

It's really too bad that Windows is just not an HTPC friendly kind of OS. Launchbox is hands down the best front end available for any platform. After using it, it's hard to consider anything else. But trying to do LB plus other HTPC type tasks on a Windows machine connected to a TV is not as smooth as it could be. It's pretty tricky to do everything with a gamepad or remote control. 

Android TV is great for that task. Kodi can have shortcuts to favorite apps so that you never really need to leave the Kodi interface if you don't want to. Windows, not so much. 

But I cannot forgo my beloved Launchbox. Even when I had Batocera up and running, the metadata was crap. Plus you had to donate money to ScreenScraper if you wanted to overcome the daily free API call quota. But all it scraped, that I could see, was a small video that runs when you hover over the game icon. No sidebar with description, info, etc. At least not that I could see. Admittedly, I only spent two days with it, but given the visuals, lack of information and the absolute flakiness of the controllers, it was time to move on and get back to a Launchbox driven solution.

Plus with Windows I have the benefit of RDP so that I can tinker with things without sitting in front of my TV. That is a huge plus. If Batocera provided an image that was ESX friendly, I may have stuck with it a bit more, but there really are no remote desktop, or even KVM, options for that solution. ESX would have provided me with a nice VMRC based out of band remote control. That would have been great, but you cannot build a vm off an .img file.

 

 

 

Edited June 21, 2021 by dmaker

[dmaker]

This is becoming quite the headache. After a couple of hours, I finally got esx 7 installed on the MSI gaming laptop. I had to create a custom iso with the usb nic drivers. Several minor hiccups later and I can now create vm's on the new esx box.

It took more tinkering to get gpu passthrough working only to find out that Nvidia blocks passthrough with consumer cards. Windows disables the device after Geforce installation with error code 43 after a restart of the vm.

Apparently you can install the drivers and then disable the card before every reboot. I saw a couple of other permanent work arounds but a quick glance at the instructions and I'd be up for another few hours doing that probably.

Going to try the disable work around first...

 

 

[dmaker]

Well, going to call time of death on this portion of the POC.  After installing Geforce drivers on the win10 vm, the display adapter looks proper in Device Manager, but some simple benchmarking showed that it was not being used. Task Manager had no entry for Nvidia adapter either. So it looks like kind of a faux sense of success. After reboot, even with disabling adapter first, as soon as I enable it, Windows shuts it down with error code 43

 

There are some convoluted looking workarounds that I just don't have the appetite for bothering with right now. GPU passthrough doesn't look much easier with Hyper-V either--even assuming Windows Server would have drivers for consumer level gaming parts like GTX 980 or Killer NIC either. 

Re-installing Windows 10 on the laptop now.

Moral of the story so far: ESX sucks on gaming hardware. Not a big surprise. I do have a license for Vmware Workstation Pro that I can use on the machine after I install Windows if I want to do some virtualization. The only issue with that is the I would most likely virtualize something like Linux Mint or some other distro for fun, but accessing the desktop is a pain in Linux. There are no great and fast options like RDP. You always have to fiddle with stuff like VNC or third party apps like NoMachine.  It's too bad that Vmware Workstation does not use the VMRC, that would be awesome as that tool is out of band and just as responsive as Windows RDP.

 

Edited June 22, 2021 by dmaker

[dmaker]

I'll focus next on figuring out how to use Nvidia Gamestream (or possibly Steam Link as well) to push Bigbox to my TV vs directly connected via HDMI. If I can easily figure that out and it's simple enough to just do that using my current, new laptop, then I'll just do that for the infrequent times that I get an opportunity to Bigbox on the big screen. If so, then I have no real use for my previous gaming laptop and will have to find some other purpose for it. Perhaps a Plex server. I've ran Plex on it in the past, but it had a tendency to crash when transcoding. Maybe I will give that another whirl at some point. Right now my current Plex server is a vm running on ESX on a headless Dell R710. So no gpu to speak of for transcoding. Not a huge deal, as I only use Plex if I am away from home and software transcoding is fine enough for a single stream. 

 

[*D1sk*]

I have the ausol problem about that topic.
When I stream bigbox via Gstream from PC to Shield it works great also I can move with the controller in the bigbox menu.
But as soon as I start a game the controller is not recognized in the game.
I use a xbox one game controller that is connected directly via USB to the Shield.

Does anyone have a solution?

I have purchased everything so that I can play the games from Bigbox comfortably on my TV in the living room. But as long as the game controller is not recognized when playing, it does not work.