There are a number of gaming-focused Linux distributions; With Batocera Linux, c’t 3003 presents one of the most successful in the video.
transcript of the video
(Note: This is bonus content for people who cannot or do not want to watch the video above. The video track information is not reflected in the transcript.)
Look: I’ll put this USB stick in any computer, turn it on, wait a few seconds — and I’ve got a super game console with thousands of games on a number of systems. And not only old things like C64 and Super Nintendo, also PS3 and Wii U are emulated here. With a super slick interface, with preview videos and you can control everything with just your controller, and you don’t have to configure anything – like no button assignments or anything, everything automatically. It’s called Batocera Linux. And yes, here on c’t 3003 there are sometimes a bit fiddly tutorials, but doing this yourself – it’s REALLY easy. Promised. Stay tuned.
Dear hackers, dear Internet surfers, welcome to…
This is Batocera Linux: You can switch between the individual systems, then choose a game and, bang, it starts – and if I press this on my Xbox One controller, I get back to the main menu. And everything runs completely without installing a USB stick. Pretty nice, right? You don’t need a fat computer for this: All 8-bit and 16-bit consoles and also the Playstation 1 and arcade authors, i.e. everything up to 1996 runs on every potato, including old notebooks, or thin clients and even Raspis – and then for Nintendo 64, Dreamcast and PSP you need a bit more power. And only for something like PS2, PS3 and Wii U do you have to have a reasonably powerful gaming computer.
So, but first of all, very briefly, what it is: Batocera is a Linux distribution and is named after a species of beetle. Simply because one of the project’s founders is a keen entomologist – and his son’s favorite insect, the Batocera. It’s quite charming.
ATTENTION NOW SHORT THEORY INSERT!
What Batocera Linux does is also done by other projects, for example RetroPie, Lakka or Recalbox – namely a Linux to knit around the two open source projects EmulationStation and RetroArch. EmulationStation is this menu here, the one where you select the systems and the individual games. And RetroArch is this menu here, for example where you can save game states or even rewind. And this RetroArch, that’s very important: Because EmulationStation can also simply start any individual, independent emulators. BUT: Then you have your own configuration and user interface for each emulator. RetroArch unifies all of that, meaning RetroArch integrates dozens of emulators under one unified interface. By the way, the interface that RetroArch uses to talk to the emulators is called Libretro, in case you happen to cross that path.
THEORY OVER, LET’S GET CONCRETE AGAIN.
So, to get Batocera on a USB stick, you go to batocera.org, click on get batocera.linux and then on your desired system. “Desktop” is probably the correct version for most people, but there are versions for Steamdeck, several other handhelds, and single-board computers. Well, and once you’ve downloaded it, you throw it bootable onto a USB data carrier, for example by using BalenaEtcher, which is available for Windows, Linux, macOS. Simply select the file here, then the target drive and then Flash. Balena sometimes spits out error messages, don’t be surprised, it’s very likely that it’s a false alarm. When the whole thing is finished, you insert the USB data carrier into the device on which you want to use Batocera. With PCs you probably have to go into the BIOS beforehand and then put the USB data carrier at the top of the boot order. Save and reboot.
Yes, and this is what Batocera looks like when you boot for the first time. With such a nice intro, well, and then there are a few non-commercial games preinstalled. Quite impressive, for example, the C64 game “Fix it Felix Jr. 64”. The open source port of the 1989 classic Prince of Persia is also preinstalled. Ah, such beautiful animations.
Oh, to control the whole thing, you simply have to connect a game controller, for example via USB or via Bluetooth. For Bluetooth you have to switch the controller to pairing mode (usually using a certain key combination) and then click on “Controller & Bluetooth Settings” in the menu. Under “Updates & Downloads” you can then download a number of other games, but that’s all freeware – so no commercial titles.
We are now entering the legal gray area. Because for many systems you need system data, i.e. BIOS files. The copyrights are often unclear, which is why Batocera does not deliver them. But you can download it on Github, for example, just search for “batocera bios github”.
Well, to play commercial games you need the ROMs or disk images of the titles. With disk-based systems such as the Playstations, you can simply rip them yourself with a disk drive on the computer, with module-based systems you need a reader for this, for example the Retrode 2. If you have ripped the ROMs of games that you own – then Is what you are doing 100% legal? Another legal way to get ROMs are commercial game collections such as Sega Mega Drive Classics on Steam. In this video here I presented a few more sources for legal ROMs.
So now you’ve gotten some ROMs from somewhere of games you want to play. And how do you get them on your Batocera stick now? Yes, very simply, for example via a second USB data carrier. But you have to connect a mouse and keyboard for a short time. If you have that, you press the “F1” key on a connected keyboard in the Batocera menu and then you come to this file manager. Then it’s best to click on “Dual-Pane-Mode” under “View”, then you have a two-part view. Here on the left I have placed my USB stick with my Megadrive ROMs and here on the right I go to the “Share” directory of my Batocera installation. Under ROMs are then the ROMs of all emulated systems. The names are self-explanatory: C64 is of course C64 and Megadrive is Megadrive. Yes, and here I then copy all the ROMs from the USB stick to the directory here. I just get out with “File” / “Close Window”.
However, I find it more elegant to copy the ROMs over the network. Your Batocera computer must of course be in the network for this. For WiFi you have to press Start on the game controller, then select Network and choose WiFi down here and enter WiFi password. If you are connected, you will see your IP address up here. Sooooo and you can then access it via Samba from a computer on your network. On a Windows PC, you simply press the Windows key, enter backslash twice and then the IP address. Zack, you are in the share folder of your Batocera USB stick. And then you can happily copy ROMs into it.
Immediately after copying you won’t see the items in the main menu, you have to press Start on the controller once, then “Game Settings” and then “Update Gamelists”. Then the games I just copied appear here in the Megadrive menu.
But it doesn’t look pretty yet, because at the moment these are only the file names, without pictures and preview videos. You can get this with the so-called scraper. So, and for this you press start, go to “Scraper” and then you can select different scrapers, the default is Screenscraper. However, you need an account for this, which you can create on screenscraper.fr. You then enter it here. Then you can still choose what you want to have downloaded, I always like to turn on “video” because I think it’s cool with the video previews. And then just click “Scrape now”. So, “Scraping finished”, now you have to update the gamelists again and now you have the correct names of the games instead of just the file names and here you have screenshots, video previews and explanatory texts.
If you want everything to look even nicer, you can download themes under “Updates & Downloads”. I’ll take “Artflix” here, for example, and then you go to “User Interface Settings” and then you can switch up here with the right and left. It all looks pretty nice.
So now emulation can do some cool things that the original hardware couldn’t do. To do this, you start a game, press the so-called hotkey button, which is the Xbox logo on Xbox controllers, for example, and then A at the same time.
In this menu you can, for example, save the game with “Save State” and load it with “Load State”. It’s quicker to save directly from the game with Hotkey-X and load Hotkey-Y.
What’s also cool: rewind and fast forward. To do this, you must first switch “Rewind support” to “on” at the bottom of this menu. And then you exit the menu with Hotkey-A and you can rewind with Hotkey-Control Pad Left and fast-forward with Control Pad Right. This is very useful for long cutscenes.
But what I find even more crazy are the automatic translations, for example from Japanese games. You can simply activate it by pressing Start in the main menu, then “Game Settings”, then “AI Game Translation”, then simply switch it on, then set the target language to German, for example, and then you can play games with Hotkey-R1 Press and then the texts on the screen will be translated.
But my personal favorite feature are the retro achievements: With them, old games also get achievements that you can unlock. You also have to register at retroachievements.org and then activate it once with Start / “Game Settings” / “Retro Achievement Settings” and enter your username and password, go out and then you have achievements. For example, if you start Ecco the Dolphin now, the achievement menu will pop up here. To see the achievements all collected, go to Batocera’s main menu, press Start and then “Retroachievements”. Then there are all the virtual medals to admire.
Isn’t it cool, this Batocera? Above all, you can cherish and maintain and curate and optimize the installation really nicely – so that at some point it looks really nice and all your personal favorite games are in it. To be honest, it’s almost more fun for me than playing the game itself. Although I do feel like a round of Space Taxi now. That was the first computer game I ever played and that’s why it burned itself into my brain as the best game in the world. Or are there even better games? Bye!
c’t 3003 is c’t’s YouTube channel. The videos on c’t 3003 are independent content and independent of the articles in c’t magazin. Editor Jan-Keno Janssen and video producers Şahin Erengil and Pascal Schewe publish a video every week.
(jkj)
