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taking on another new project !!
wanted a way to easily play DVDs and Blu-Ray from different regions, as well as to consolidate other movies and shows I've got saved, and decided to throw in a Game Boy cartridge player into it as well
could I have just bought myself an external Blu-Ray drive and used my laptop, or found a region unlocked player? yeah, but that's lame
had to upgrade my Raspberry Pi tho - my 4B can't power DVD drives by itself
I've also since decided to have the Game Boy cartridge reader be separate to the main unit - that way I can easily use it with my computer
I had the idea of having something to direct the DVD drive and the Game Boy reader to a cable that runs to my PC, but I think that'll complicate the design too much
to my surprise, Kodi isn't liking me trying to do something that Kodi doesn't seem designed for (or at least these distributions of Kodi)
I literally just want to run an AppImage 
this close to just going "fuck it" and writing my own GUI wrapper that lets you choose between a DVD, the Game Boy Operator software and something for playing saved media because I can't find ANYTHING that doesn't have compromises
trying out Batocera as one last shot bc it comes with Kodi and allegedly allows standalone Linux apps to be installed and launched through its interface
I think my problem is I'm trying to approach this as if the device needs to be a gaming system and media centre at the same time; Kodi isn't a good gaming system (at least for my purposes) and something like Retropie isn't a good media centre
there's nothing stopping me from just installing everything I need on a bog standard version of Debian and have some sort of setup in the desktop environment to manage and swap between both, however I'd like to avoid just resorting to "generic Linux" as to avoid the need to excessively prune and manage system resources
Batocera is my last resort for specialised software solutions, afterwards I'll start brainstorming how to put something custom together
ok yeah Batocera isn't right either
I think my next step should be trying to get Kodi and Playback (the software used by my Game Boy reader) running independently in an X11 session on Debian
I currently have Playback and Kodi running independently on Raspbian, and can switch between the desktop and Kodi freely
I've got Playback added as a game in Lutris, and the Lutris-Kodi add-on installed in Kodi, but the add-on seems to be broken 
back to trying to use Advanced Kodi Launcher again
added the AppImage as a source, and a launcher that just executes whatever file the source is
assigned the basic executable launcher to the Playback source, and play the Playback source
log files say there was no configured launcher for the source (there is) so it just tries to use some other launcher that I've deleted, which obviously fails, and then it tells me "This game isn't compatible with any available emulators"
I'm just trying to launch an AppImage?????????
if somebody out there who knows anything more about Kodi than I do could spare some wisdom I would be very grateful, I really feel like this shouldn't be an issue
having trouble getting Kodi to directly play DVDs again too ughhhhh
trying to get Pegasus frontend working cuz it looks like it'll let me easily choose between Playback and Kodi, however I'm having trouble installing it on the Pi and its documentation + support community is pretty useless
taking a breather from this now, it's tilting just how much I'm struggling to get something so simple working
maybe I should try targeting something other than Raspbian