Kessel Run
I found myself wanting to play Age of Empires, but I was on a Mac. What's someone to do?
Run a gaming machine in AWS and stream the game to my laptop, that's what!
What is it
Use CDK to set up a Cloud Gaming machine in about half an hour. As long as you remember to stop the instance when you no longer need it, you only pay about $0.50/hour of active use, plus $5/month for the disk storage.
How to use
You need the following:
- An AWS account
- A Parsec account (and Parsec installed)
- A Microsoft Remote Desktop Client installed
Configure AWS credentials and configure your default region:
# EITHER
$ aws configure
# OR
$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
$ export AWS_REGION=...
Finally, run:
$ npx instacdk deploy rix0rrr/kessel-run
The command will run for a while, and finally spit out a URL. Visit that URL in your browser to get the IP address, admin password for initial RDP setup, and start/stop the instance.
To get rid of everything created by this application, run:
$ npx instacdk manage
Or log in to the CloudFormation console and delete the KesselRunStack stack.
Future improvements
- Authentication to the management page. Right now, keep the URL secret as anyone who has it can access your instance!
- Use a small EBS volume to boot from and a larger, cheaper EBS volume (which can even be persisted between instances) to store games on.
- Use spot pricing for the instances, saving ~$0.15/hour of active use.