Turning a 10 years old phone into a retro games emulator and e-reader [Kie's Lab, issue 1]

I've starting working on a new project!!!

Recently, I've been seeing a lot of videos of modded consoles, and since I have wanted to root an Android device for a long time, I decided to turn an old phone of mine into an all-purpose device. The idea is to have it function like a retro games emulator, e-reader, mp3 player and digicamera.

Now, none of these functions require rooting per-se, but as I mentioned before I've always wanted to try rooting, and I was definetly not going to start with the phone I currently use.

The unfortunate victim is a Sony Xperia M5. It's almost 10 years-old, it has 16 gigs disk space (so around 10GB if we consider the space taken by the OS), and 3GB RAM. Which should be enough for what I want to do, although I might need to get an SD card.

Here is a picture of the patient before the surgery:

I have several old phones sitting in my house, but I picked this one specifically because it's small and sleek, so it's gonna be easy to carry around. I've had to throw away the old cover because after several years in my drawer the plastic had started falling apart, but thankfully covers for this model are still being sold online. 

So far: I've prepped everything needed for rooting on my PC (mostly android command line tools), updated the drive and unlocked the bootloader, then installed Magisk on the phone through its .apk.

Next step will be to complete the rooting process by patching the image and flashing it. Then I'll start customizing the phone and downloading apps, music, eboks and ROMs! Finally, if everything works fine I'll get a new cover and customize that as well :-)