In this post, I want to take you on a journey. A journey back to the future… of retro gaming. I’ve long extolled the virtues of retropie, however my head was recently turned by Batocera. I wish I had discovered it sooner!
I’m a big user and advocate for Raspberry Pi devices. They are great, low power devices that have so many versatile uses. In my house, we have been using a Pi4 running retropie and many hours of fun has been had – see my previous post about how my kids love retro gaming).
For the uninitiated, retropie is a distribution that can be deployed on a suitable Pi device that combines Pi OS, EmulationStation, RetroArch and many other projects resulting in the ability to run and play arcade, console, and classic PC games.
There are a number of retro gaming distributions (see above) but Batocera caught my eye. I happened to have a Dell 3050 SFF machine which I figured would make a good host for my latest project.
After downloading the image for my architecture, the first step was to create a bootable disk. There are a number of tools for this purpose (such as rufus) but I generally use Balena Etcher. As I was using a small form factor PC, I wanted to image Batocera on to a hard drive – in this case a WD SSD, for which I needed a USB to SATA3 cable (the hoarder that I am, of course I have one lying around!):
On to Etcher. There are a number of reasons I like Etcher but one of them is the fact that it warns when a drive over a certain capacity is being used, checking that you are not overwriting an actual drive on your system.
After selecting the Batocera download as the source image, click on select target:
For me, I then selected the WD drive (Etcher identifies this as a large drive):
Once selected, Etcher also wants to check you are really sure:
Once accepted, off it goes:
So at this point, I had an SSD drive that has Batocera installed on it. Next step was to then put it in the PC. A quick view of the internals of my machine:
Once the drive was installed, it was simply a case of powering up the PC. I had connected a monitor via DisplayPort and also a mouse and keyboard.
I wasn’t expecting much, but it booted quickly and was immediately greeted with Batocera. So far so good. Next up was to load some ROM files on to the PC.
There are some default ROM files available and configured, but I wanted to put some ROMs I have on to the device. By default, the Batocera machine will create an SMB share that can be accessed over the local network – in my case 10.100.0.142:
Once the files have been uploaded to the correct sub folder, it is a case of going back to the Batocera machine and then working through emulation station. Rather than try to describe this step, the best guide to follow is the official one from Batocera themselves (if you haven’t used emulation station before):
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The performance of emulated games is great. It is way better than retropie, but to be fair, it isn’t a fair comparison based on the underlying hardware. Nonetheless, I have found my retro games machine for the foreseeable.
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