[TheBuz]

I am currently working on making Kodi the front-end GUI for a Living Room/couch gaming PC, I have it working for myself, but it has it's quirks.

The idea is, to have Kodi as a GUI replacing the Windows 10/7 GUI, and adapt it to be "Console" like experience but for PC. Steam Big picture handles this really well but it's media features are no match for Kodi, So we'll have the best of both.

We can launch steam big picture from kodi, which is great, but there are no options for Uplay, Origin and Battle.net (Adding EA and Blizzard games to steam has it's own problems). Everything with PC Gaming is so fragmented and I want to bring all in one place, under a beautiful kodi roof. The End game is to have one install file.


Whilst we can individually do this for ourselves I think I would be a great benefit to PC gaming if we can have something that somebody can install within a few minutes.

“Why make a post? Get on with it already…”
I am, but I probably can’t do it alone, so if there’s any suggestions, tips, advice, help let me know.
I am teaching myself how to code and want to do this as my first real project.
-Buz

[wsnipex]

this has already been done by Dell/Alienware in form of their now abandoned HiveMind Gui for Alienware Alpha "console" PCs.
They took kodi and put a custom skin along with a few proprietary addons for launching all those gaming services.

You can also use the advanced launcher addon to execute any binary.

[TheBuz]

I didn't know that about dell, thank you, did it ever get uploaded anywhere? Sounds like it would be fun to mess about with.

Edit: I found it, i'll try it out tonight looks like development stopped a couple of years ago.

[natethomas]

To my knowledge they uploaded the bits that connect with Kodi, but they also had a closed binary that interacted directly with Windows to prevent a bunch of annoying windows functions from getting in the way. To my knowledge, that was never opened.

[TheBuz]

To my knowledge they uploaded the bits that connect with Kodi, but they also had a closed binary that interacted directly with Windows to prevent a bunch of annoying windows functions from getting in the way. To my knowledge, that was never opened.

 Yes, it seems a lot of the proprietary software is locked away, I guess i’m making the spiritual successor to HiveMind, I’ll call it “MindHive” no that’s a terrible name, I’ll work on that later.  But there is software like  Photon, Lauchbox and Playnite (terrible name worse than MindHive but it look the best), which might be ideal.

I could use one of those and then just find a way to link to stores so you can buy games, or make a companion app for buying/finding games.