I was specifically recommended AntiX on Hexbear after I asked for distributions suitable for ancient hardware

I’m currently in the process of formatting and re-installing AntiX with the Live USB I still had. I guess I should’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade to AntiX-23 while I was at it, but I can do that later.

Like I said though, the official repos didn’t seem to have the most up-to-date versions of the media players I use

There’s nothing mission critical in there so I’m mostly fine with reinstalling.

I just wanted to update VLC and my other media players so Youtube would work again. The AntiX repos only had outdated versions, which could be due to the fact that AntiX-21 was followed by AntiX-23 last year. Maybe it’s no longer kept up to date? I tried grabbing the newest versions direct from their websites/githubs first but it’s not as simple as grabbing an .exe and clicking it on Linux so I gave up and just went ham on the repos, assuming they wouldn’t let me brick my computer.

Lesson learned, I suppose

I always forget how the Dreamcast shared games with both the PS1 and PS2.

I started with the PlayStation so both the SNES and MD are a bit before my time. I have delved into the SNES catalogue since there’s lots of well-known and still talked about games and series for an easy jumping-off point. Streets of Rage isn’t actually a bad recommendation at all, it’d probably fit my handheld use case very well. Do you have any favored Mega Drive/Genesis emulator on Android? I assume there’s a RetroArch core (or three) for that

I have played Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense… but on the PS1. Maybe I should look into PS1 games that I like that got DC ports, though I will say that the Dreamcast having only 2 shoulder buttons is annoying when you’re used to a game being able to use more, like with DOA2 where you have two less options for binding button combos

Yeah, you can play the game upscaled to any resolution you want and in widescreen, and it looks very nice (apart from the widescreen patch occasionally displaying stuff that was not intended to be seen):

The reason for the fan server only working with the Japanese versions of the games is because the JPN region servers were what the team behind the fan server managed to reverse engineer. The US and European server were killed in 2007 while Capcom kept the Japanese servers going on for 4 more years. There’s actually a video about the creation of the fan server on Youtube.

I guess I don’t need to sleep if its a weekend

It is, actually. The wiki at obsrv.org has instructions on how to set things up on a real PS2 and in fact recommends it as the most stable option. Not sure if there would be load time shenanigans between a PS2’s DVD read speed and emulators running on all sorts of different devices.

http://wiki.obsrv.org/index.php?n=Main.HomePage

It looks like you can also play on a PS3! Neat.

Note that you will need a way to run the patched Japanese isos at the very least, unless you have the original Japanese discs on hand and the region locking isn’t an issue.

Remember that you don’t need to hard mod your PS2 in this day and age with things like FreeMCBoot.

PCSX2 has a Linux version so you should be good to go. (Steam Deck users can play the games online too, in case any are reading this)