035 - Retro-friendly homelabs with ZimaOS

035 - Retro-friendly homelabs with ZimaOS

From The 8 Bit Files by John Biehler and Dave Zille

January 4, 2026 · 1h 13m · Season 1 · Episode 35

About this episode

John and Dave explore ZimaOS and building an affordable home lab with repurposed hardware, discussing various related topics.

In this episode, John and Dave talk about discovering ZimaOS and building an affordable home lab using repurposed hardware - and how that single setup quickly expands into media streaming, network-wide ad blocking, ROM organization, browser-based retro gaming, backups, and local services. Along the way, they also touch on the Commodore 64 Ultimate, a Sega Channel preservation project, a retro electronics repair simulator, and why digital preservation and self-hosting matter more than ever. Topics & sub-topics discussed: ZimaOS - app-based operating system that makes home labs approachable https://www.zimaspace.com/zimaos Home lab fundamentals - NAS, backups, ad blocking, VMs, and always-on servers ROMM - organizing ROM libraries with metadata, artwork, and downloads https://github.com/rommapp/romm EmulatorJS - play retro games directly in your web browser https://emulatorjs.org Jellyfin - self-hosted media streaming without subscriptions https://jellyfin.org The 8-Bit Files Podcast & Discord https://the8bitfiles.com

People in this episode

Hosts: John Biehler, Dave Zille

Topics covered

  • ZimaOS
  • home lab
  • media streaming
  • digital preservation
  • self-hosting
  • retro gaming

Keywords

  • ZimaOS
  • home lab
  • media streaming
  • ad blocking
  • ROM organization
  • retro gaming
  • digital preservation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ZimaOS, Commodore 64 Ultimate, Sega Channel, ROMM, EmulatorJS, Jellyfin, The 8-Bit Files Podcast, Discord, ZimaSpace, GitHub

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