Background
We recently bought a Kinhank X5 Pro 4TB, one of those Android single-board-computers that has a bunch of pre-configured game emulators and roms already installed. A suspicious device, yes, but it was recommended by folks we found fairly trustworthy.
This is a device we want the kids to use. Our oldest currently is thirteen, and there obviously are going to be games on this thing that we do not want the kids to play. Doing some initial research online was not very fruitful, as there are absolutely zero documents about this device that I could find. I could find a few websites talking about it, but most of them were just directly copying Kinhank’s webpage for the device.
There were some facebook and reddit groups about this device, or others like it, but still nothing that actually talked about restricting the games that could be played. I was hoping at the very least the frontends would have a way to set something like a parental code to limit games by ESRB rating.
Frontends
The Kinhank looks like it has two “frontends” configured, both of which appear to be modified by Kinhank in some way. These are “Pegasus K” and “ES-DE K”.
ES-DE K
The one that looked to be meant as the default on the device I received was “ES-DE K”. This was the only application added to the homescreen originally. While playing around with this, it seemed less intuitive to use than Pegasus.
However, after learning more about how each of the frontends work, ES-DE may be easier to automatically configure with a different set of games. After switching to a new hard drive with only a handful of games installed, it was able to re-generate the list of systems it supports, and found the games I moved into those directories. I wasn’t able to actually launch the games from there though, so something still wasn’t wired up properly.
So I quickly moved my attention to Pegasus, since that is the frontend that I thought would be more intuitive for the kids to use.
Pegasus K
As mentioned, I found this one to be more intuitive to use. It looks more like a Netflix or Amazon Prime type layout for the games. ES-DE in contrast looked like it was trying to replicate some of the arcade-game style UIs for choosing games. I’m sure you can customize the themes of each, but Pegasus was already looking like something that would be fairly simple for the kids to figure out, so I struck out trying to reconfigure it for the limited games I wanted.
Pegasus relies on a directory and metadata file structure for UI assets for games, such as the artwork to display for the game’s image, and the title logo for each game. The metadata files set up the information for the games, as well as update/override where Pegasus will search for the assets for the game. See the Pegasus documentation for more details on how all of that works.
Setup
I wanted to start the kids off with about a dozen games to choose from. I copied the games I wanted them to start with from Roms directory of the 4TB drive to a smaller USB portable hard drive, matching the same directory structure for the systems that was on the original drive.
I then copied the assets out of the media directories that corresponded to the games I copied. These are the things like the box artwork and title logos that will be displayed when browsing the game list in Pegasus. If you want less setup when you add more games and don’t care too much about space, you could just copy the entire media directory for each system, as Pegasus will only display the files for the ROMs that actually exist.
I also copied the metadata.txt files for each system. These contain the entire game list for each system. But again, Pegasus will only display the games where the ROMs actually exist. So I just copied the entire file, to not worry about needing to comment and uncomment lines when I move games around, and because it is just text and disk space for that isn’t really a concern here.
Roms
|- ps2
|- media
| - box2dfront
| - game1.png
| - game2.png
| - screenshot
| - game1.png
| - game2.png
| - video
| - game1.png
| - game2.png
|- metadata.txt
|- game1.iso
|- game2.isoYou can see the resulting structure in the code block above.
Lastly, I had to actually configure Pegasus to use the new directories. You need to have the metadata.txt files exist in the directories before you can do this. When starting Pegasus after swapping out the hard drives, it gave me a sad face saying it could not find any games, go check the logs. Sliding in from the right-hand side of the screen opens up a menu where you can get to the settings. Again, see the documentation for more details.
I added the new directories in the “Set Game Directories” setting, and the games appeared (I don’t remember if I had to restart Pegasus or not after updating the directories).
No Parental Controls
In short, I didn’t find any kind of parental controls on the Kinhank X5 Pro “Super Console”. So I had to copy only a subset of the games I wanted to allow my kids to play, and then set up the system for those changes.
It wasn’t a hard process, but, having not had experience with really any of these technologies in the past, had a steep learning curve. Hopefully this will be helpful to others if they try to go down this road.