Are These $40 Batocera Drives Worth Buying? - 43,000 ROMs / Plug & Play 🏴☠️
2023 ж. 11 Қыр.
882 509 Рет қаралды
Amazon has a ton of retro emulation hard drives, but are they worth buying?
Gear Used
HB Mini: amzn.to/48a42gA
SER7: shrsl.com/48122
8BitDo Controller: amzn.to/3Rleagq
AYANEO KUN: www.indiegogo.com/projects/ay...
GPD WIN Mini: www.indiegogo.com/project/pre...
USB Cable: amzn.to/3TrhFRT
Camera: amzn.to/3REWpcj
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#hyperbasemini #batocera
I remember spending 2 days downloading 1 rom on dialup....
Those were the days
To save on several floppy disks
Now we wait 1 week for it to arrive by snail mail 😂
When? 1995?
@@arw2008 97-98
With every emulation device I always find myself spending more time curating than playing the actual games. Deleting games I don't want and adding games that are missing. Editing cover art, etc... very time consuming.
Funny what we spend our time doing. I’m similar. I tinker more than I play.
Count me in, and then I get hung up when I inevitably come across a game that doesn’t have cover art. Knowing no matter how much time I invest I’ll never have artwork for every game and every system is a bummer lol.
@@johnhinkleman9757I definitely tinker more than playing but I still play the games
ADHD
Lol, Glad im not the only one
PS3 is also a retro system now. It's 15 years old. Just like 1988's Genesis was already retro in 2003.
I don't like this information...
@@grigoris.7732we are old haha
Including just 1 rom per system is a positive. It means you don't have to worry about finding/ setting up a bios, configuring the emulator, etc. Basically, all you have to do is find your own rom and drop it into the roms folder.
I disagree. They still could have bios files etc. ready for user to just pop in their own roms.
Absolutely ....I guess we traded playing for tinkering 😞
Agreed. Better than having to sort through hundreds of thousands of doubles, junk games and games in foreign languages.
I would 100% agree except the drive doesn’t have enough space to add even a single ROM
Speaking of which, does anyone here know if they have a drive with the Wii-U emu (Or even somewhere that has just the emu set up and ready to go)? I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’ve been playing with emulators for a loooooong time, and even though I’ve tried quite a few times, I’ve never been able to get that (Cemu?) one to work, and I’ve been dying to play affordable space adventure for… geez I don’t even know, like 10 years!
I LOVE how you actually show how to customize some settings.
If you're gonna pirate, at least don't pay people for it...
As he said at the end, you are paying for the convenience. Sure you could do this for free but it's pretty complicated.
The free storage problem is just batocera. It's boot file is technically a seperate partition but its only like 1.5gb. I had to do some tedious extending of a spacing partition to then be able to extend the boot one. Even then, just download the update files and drop them in. Much faster than the OS function
Wow. You're just so damned thorough. What an incredible video/review. Instant SUBSCRIBE.
Bactocera is amazing I’ve turned so many old pcs into amazing gaming systems
I just went with retropie. There are a lot of prebuilt images for most card sizes.
I usually like the system padding as it gives you a known space where you can add more games. But that's pretty redundant when the drive is completely full
🤨
My mate got the 512GB version (around $60) for his Steam Deck. He ignored all the rubbish and put the good stuff directly on his Deck and runs it through Emudeck.
Man I need something like that. 512gb with ps1 and Dreamcast.
Does it have nintendo switch games?
@@ChampagneOppaRN Different sellers have different collections on their cards. It is always best to ask (they will send you a link so you can see what is on the cards they are selling). The 512GB Batocera SD card that my mate got for his Steam Deck had no Switch games on it. I think it only went as far as WII & Wii U for Nintendo. But it is worth checking with each seller what you are actually getting, as different sellers have different configurations. Whichever you get, (SD card or external HDD) it is probably better to dump Batocera and just keep the stuff you actually want to play and run it through Emudeck.
@seanrm that's what I'm thinking. So hard to find roms without risking virus
@@ChampagneOppaRN it's not really that hard.
I spent a week getting all the games I wanted from SNES to PS2 and with 250gb I got all the games I wanted.
Everyone... Please make sure you remove or disable your internal drive before booting these flash drives on your computer. A malicious virus or program can access your misconfigured internal drive and maybe steal your files and photos. Same thing if you have other USB devices or backup drives plugged in during your gameplay. Even if you don't connect to the internet, a virus can compromise your internal drive and when you go back to your windows, boom!
That's right so don't buy these drives and find your games elsewhere
I paid a little more than that for a Batocera SD Card for my Steam Deck - with a nicely curated lineup. I was happy with the purchase as I do not have the inclination to do all that work myself and do not have great home internet living in a cabin in the mountains (have 4G based internet). It was a pain in the butt to make my SD Card for my MODE modified Dreamcast, so the drive I bought was well worth it for me.
I get the reason these exist (some people just don't want to deal with finding their own ROMs and putting them on a front end). But I do think it's worth it for most people to just find some tutorial videos and put together their own ROM sets and even a front end if they want... most of the thousands of games on these micro SD cards people sell are games 99% of people will never play... better off learning how to do it yourself.
And then there are the same game in 10 languages. At all there are only a few games worth playing. Just like these consoles that with 40000+ games.
@@niklasfeldbusch318so many Chinese bootleg reskins..
Some Roms do not work goldeneye I tried all goldeneye Roms from any site that have it still does not play properly
@@dragonball3166 Are you saying there are no Goldeneye ROMs on the internet that work properly? Because that’s def not true. I have multiple Goldeneye ROMs and they all work as good as the original game.. as long as you have decent hardware and the right emulator. Or did you mean ROMs just on these preloaded cards?
As someone who got out of PCing in the 90's looking at all this seems like the bar to entry is very high I have watch a lot of videos on this AFTER a video of someone with a SINDEN setup appeared in my KZhead suggestions and honestly light gun games are what I miss most about retro gaming I remember as a teen my dad bought a wide Screen TV and I was all excited to set up Time Crisis on my PS1 and didn't work I was my absolute favourite PS1 game bar FF7. Would absolutely love to play Time Crisis and other light gun games again.
the GPD mini looks awesome but starting at around $1000 AUD is insane
Who wouldn't mind stuffing a USB stick, from who knows where, into their own computer?
Run it directly from USB without an hard drive. What would a virus do ?
@@rowshanara3122 I like your thinking.
hey Taki, is Batocera on deck better then just trying to run Emu-Deck? i've had a few issues with Emu-Deck but it does run no issue. i know we lose some OS features but are there any other issues we'd run into running batocera on deck? does it run better? is it better performance? is there any sort of FPS increases in say PS3?
I am sorry for the off topic, but what kind of screen are you using? Looking for some decent panel.
I would be concerned about malware, trojan and viruses on these things. Did you do any security checks?
I scanned this with several AV apps, but end users should still do that on their own.
The handhelds you show off are so cool! I wish I was rich enough to own a PC handheld. 😅
Same here friend 👌
Some of them are budget friendly even for low salaries. Here in Italy I get paid 6€/h but still can afford one system
People love these themes... I've never set one up, but can you not create subfolders? Like on my Everdrives, I'll create folders based on the games' titles. A-D, E-H, I-L, etc. Makes it easier to find things. Is that an option in Emulation Station or whatever this is?
Ok that's cool and all. But where did you get the Gundam skin/shell/case for the steam deck?
1 game for gamecube is a crime
cannot wait for my gpd mini :D
The benefit is they've loaded every bios on these, all a new usee do is have to load the roms they want in and it's playable without work arounds. The best thing to do is delete thw bloat on the system and load on what you want.
hey @TakiUdon , could you tell me why Batocera will not work on my nVidia Shield?
Aside from the fact that I wouldn't trust some random flash drive from countries where copyright is more of a suggestion than a law without wiping it first (thus rendering it pointless) this is just not something I would need. But I guess there is a place for something like that, it is crazy how much technology there is in the world and there are certainly places where connectivity and tech literacy is low enough for this to be a good option. That aside, I do like the fact that you acknowledge the existence of these things, many people talking about retrogaming like to pretend stuff like this doesn't exist and everyone is just playing their legal roms. And while people do probably have to say that for legal reasons, this is still something that should be shown and discussed.
You boot from the drive. It can't infect itself, that would be stupid.
@thisnowthen no but it could access the drive in the computer you put it in.
@@snowthearcticfox1 LOL think about the words coming out of your mouth finger tips and mind!!!! What could a USB!!!! drive access!!!? Does the USB drive have a wireless bluetooth it can send the contents of your pc to!!!???? Are you insinuating that the USB flash drive is an advanced mini computer living AI that costs £30 and can decide to steal your precious data that an Anbernic or Powkiddy or steamdeck youre willing to stick in your PC willingly cant at £200+?????
@@antwango^you know nothing about hacking and its extremely obvious
@@antwangoIt could ruin what's on your drive if it wants to. A USB bootable can see other drives on the system. Even Linux can mount and modify NTFS filesystems. So yeah, a bootable can mess up what's on your drives if it's programmed to.
Instead of deleting games, could you copy everything into a bigger sdcard and then upgrade to have more space?
Thanks to batocera and steam deck, a million more people are getting involved in emulating. And this is what I’m waiting for. I just don’t have the time to go through it all and I’m hoping that eventually there will lots of fully loaded batocera SD cards to just plug into my deck and enjoy.
Question: Would it be possible to transfer the data on that drive to a spare 512gb thumb drive in order to have more space for larger games?
Yes
You'd still have to configure the drive to boot everything, at that point just DIY
Thanks to batocera and steam deck a million more people are getting involved in emulating. And this is what I’m waiting for. I just don’t have the time to go through it all and I’m hoping that eventually there will lots of fully loaded batocera SD cards to just plug into my deck and enjoy.
Frl I want to make my own with what I want but man college abt to start and I don't have time for that
The batocera devs hate these things, the sellers take no responsibility for what they are doing.
pretty neat tho
Wdym by taking responsibility? Like profiting off of Batocera which is free?
They are associating the botocera project with illegal activity that they do not endorse. When the sellers end up getting in trouble so does the batocera team and they have to deal with shit that is not their fault.@@lucykaede5863
@@lucykaede5863because they manage and support a community. If the seller distribute an image with something not working it create a lot of work for the support team which are generally also the devs. As part of the Onion Team I can say that we hate this too.
@@lucykaede5863 I think the possibility that a malicious seller could put something like a virus on the SD card which may go unnoticed by the end user.
I'd like to see something like this on an SD card that is fully scraped and filled with artwork, and made to perfectly support the steam deck, so UI scaling really nicely, and settings completely optimized to run as maximum as possible on the Steam Deck. Also would like to see a 512GB card and more PS2 era games available.
I see these pop up on Facebook Marketplace quite often.
Almost all of them are done by questionable Chinese companies that get shut down if there's too much attention. They're just trying to make a quick buck before disappearing. None of these guys are dedicating any real effort and resources for that stuff.
you need a 1tb batocera card, i have one on my steam deck and I get about 8 hours out of it on the deck before hwving to charge
@@sws212 Of course they are. A Real company can't sell one of these in the first place because 90% of these companies, ESPECIALLY NINTENDO, will never ever ever license out their games to be distributed like this. Selling these things is an outright violation of copyright law.
Can you copy the sd card to another one? Or to a computer and jus run it all off a folder on a HDD??
What charger are you using on the steam deck ?
And ive had the same rom collection since i was 8, growing the list as i got older. Now i mostly download roms of found unreleased titles.
Excellent 👍
One thing to note is that the Batocera team will NOT support pre-made distributed images/drives as resale of these is not allowed in their policy.
I don't want to play 43,000 games. That's why I've taken the time to curate the games for each system that I'll actually play. No need to scroll through thousands of crappy games, terrible room hacks and duplicates
Thats the truth
And how did you know which games to keep from the large list. Having complete romsets lets you discover new favorites. Then you can curate to your hearts content once you’ve found what you like.
Do you happen to have a video on how to make a USB like this?
Reminds me of the Minds blown, when we had 10-20Game Cartridges for the GameBoy back then 😆
One system puzzled me when I saw it, Sufami Turbo had 13 games released in total, in your list it shows 1964 games, so I wonder what actually IS there. Did they scrape Super Famicom as Sufami Turbo perhaps or is there also a seperate Super Famicom platform section?
They added the full SNES library in the Sufami folder. XD
id like to see a video on how to make a usb drive like this, im sure i could figure it oput but i have a steam deck and LOVE retro games, and having a guide to do this would make life a LOT easier
Hey could you share which portable monitor were you using on the beginning of the video? If there's a review video you can also add here. Thanks
Did you manage to find out the model of the monitor or what it is? I don’t understand how to google this, is it a tablet, a TV screen, a monitor?
Do you have a link to the Steamdeck skin in the video?
At $40 how much space is on the drive?
When you get more excited; over that 1 ROM or a few, than over the thousands you've either seen or heard of before This is why Storage Space is my #1 concern on a Device - to have the room for all the ROMs you care to load up, then curating them; pruning the ones you don't want, leaving the onesyou do want, making x amount of assorted folders, getting everything labeled & organized... It's a labor of love, but it feels awesome knowing you have your hoard of ROMs, all nice & neatly arranged, everything where you can find it, then play it I've been spending more time just picking a game I remember, going into the Title Screen - then letting the Music play... pure nostalgic bliss. I can still hear Batman NES, or Battletoads, etc
Do you think it would be worth getting and adding your own stuff? Or is it better to just set up your own drive?
Make your own
Would love to hear your opinion on Coin-Ops
My biggest fear for something like this would be embedded malware like all the android tv boxes have. Did you do any testing to ensure that wasn't present here?
id bet money it has the same malware as those android tv boxes
It's own distro. It can only really infect itself... I suppose it could read your hard drives though.
@@chowchilla9501 It can affect and compromise anything it's connected to. Any other drives in the compute and anything else on the network if it's connected to the network.
You don't get what he is saying. Batocera isn't launched from your main OS. Looking it up it would appear that Batocera does not communicate with other hard drives on the system so I doubt it can affect your OS. However it might still be able to spread on the network or in those rare cases infect the Bios.
@@Gatorade69You could bootstrap anything to load any type of malware and then load the Batocera OS. so any local drives or anything connected on the same VLAN is at risk.
Imagine going 20-30 years back with steam deck and showing it to your friends, and when they ask "what games you have there" you just answer "every-freaking-single one of them"
Are there good ROM sets and bad ROM sets? How’s the input lag? My experience with microSD game systems is that the card gets SUPER HOT and I had one fail after a month of playing it because it overheated the card.
Pick n mix mate! All the fun of the draw!! You get to keep the roms or you can decide to delete them lol
I got a retrostation system on a micro sd card and it did the same thing... It got so hot I burned my finger touching the card. What's up with that?
the old roms used to be hit-miss but Taki knows more about this than anyone. he can tell us!
I would copy all the roms off the card before even trying it. Cheap sd card etc have been known to fail quickly
@@joshuascholar3220 Makes sense...I just wonder how good the ROMs on this are?
Marketing plug and play then having to boot up BIOS to get it to work is mental.
Could you copy the image to a larger drive to expand sets without bothering the settings?
Yes, I've done so.
Chris.. you'd have to clone it not copy it..when I tried the install to new drive option it comes bare of the ROMs and artwork of course..then you copy thousands of ROMs manually and then artworks but then the artworks don't appear..or some do some don't..then you'll need to scrape if your internet provider works with the server..unlike my service which times out after about 50MB..or other server requires you make an account and donation..that's my experience..yours may be better
Hi great video i just purchased this usb drive from aliexpress and i wanna run i t on a steam deck but i've notice that you didn't connected straight to SD so do i need a dock to let it play cuz on the website they give usb c to usb adapter and i just wish it would be possible just to connect it straight into the deck
great breakdown! upgrading from batocera 35 to 37 is a royal pain in the butt.
Maybe a dumb question, but could you just move the files from a product like this onto a new (bigger) drive? Would you still be able to boot the same? If that were the case you could update as needed and add new or missing roms to the library
Probably not because of the booting option, not 100% sure, but you need a bootable drive with batocera, then you can move the files.
The issue lies in the malware of these things, apparently some of this company’s other products had reviews that said the devices flagged with Trojan malware on them. You would be better off just finding the games you want online, rather than trusting this company.
how would this work on a unisoc t618 handheld? seems mildly overpriced, but if it can boot plug n play and allow me to reclaim a 512GB sd card might be worth it
It won't work. This is an x86 build of Batocera.
I'm kinda impressed by how polished this looks. I half expected it to be a straight up scam.
The usb drive or batocera? Batocera is software you can download and run.. it’s not made by the seller of this usb drive.
@@bankruptsee its like install windows, 90% of people pay for it, search for the right emulator, search roms in virus friendly webpages, its not for all people
Does this sd card corrupt easy if I order it 😅
@@bankruptsee is this an easy process?
Can you make a tutorial on how to make our own usb retro emulation drives? I have a 1TB usb drive! Thanks!
Did you scan this USB drive for Malware or virus before you booted it?
What would be the best collection to buy then please? This one seems to have lackluster selection of Ps1 etc. Thanks!
Taki, what monitor is that
This is like paying $40, to take the risks you'd take for free if you pick up a USB stick off the sidewalk. This video is missing what you did to make sure it was safe before you put it in any device you cared about.
Yay tiny switch keychain 😁
OMG TAKI I LOVE YOU! that sega game you played "Double clutch" i been looking for the name of that game for AGEs i played it when i was a kid but never knew its name.... and now ill have it, thank you
Great video! Does this work on Retroid or Anbernic products?
I wonder if this will work with my arcade1up countercade...
That Gundam Skin is awesome
May i ask what the device in the left corner is at the start of the video?
I have no PC knowledge but would love to get a light gun set up SINDEN or GUN4IR but it don't understand most videos on the subject many people say you can set up a mini PC to do this but I don't understand what I would need to buy and what to do with it if I did try to, do you have any helpful videos or info for a rank novice?
I would like a video on this as well.
@@judasblewit I have seen a lot of of videos showing how to set up a mini PC to do retro shooting game set ups for SINDEN and GUN4IR some are very good and are more helpful to a novice bit all assume some basic PC knowledge and use PC terms and lingo I don't understand unfortunately all methods to do this seem to require you to have a PC to start with to modify the Mini PC usually easing the factory operating system and replacing it with Batocera.
@@matthew-005 ok I see. I'll start doing some research. I have a PC but will have to purchase all the other parts. I would like to build something like this if the Internet goes down or power goes out I can still game lol.
Ok so I'm gonna get straight to the point in currently using batocera V38 and loving it but for some reason windows games at least those that work I can't seem to get a fps counter going and also temps ,when I turn on DXVK hud and DXvk feature on I get a black screen , using a HP office PC as batocera console Specs Cpu-I5 -4570 GPU - Intel HD 4600 graphics (onboard graphics) Ram-8gb DDR3 1600mhz Storage - 500gb HDD Plz any advice would help
Can you pull these ROMs off and backup for use with other frontends, emulators, etc?
of course! in fact, I saw another video where it is imperative you copy off the data off the media because you have no idea how cheap the media they use is. Sure enough in that video, the media started to fail and go corrupt just minutes after the person copied all the data!
On the powerful handheld could you run xbox gta san andreas, or burnout 3 ?
100% legit games man, I agree.
100%
Lol like everything on these devices! I like the high horse he has decided to get back on like these devices that made his channel didnt come preloaded with 1000s of ROMS i like how he has just suddenly realised AGAIN the reason these things are popular!!!!???? Mindblown!!!
@@antwango i feel like it is not that crazy to be more interested in the hardware and the people excited about the hardware rather than the people too lazy to learn how to download a rom
I wouldn't mind one of these all pre-set up with just Arcade games like some of the Pi builds you can find.
Put the drive into an arcade cabinet with a pc, that's what I did, it's a great addition to the bar
regarding the storage issue, cant you just clone the USB to a 256GB usb drive and boot from it and do the update like that ?
would this work on an nvidia tv?
Wow, I'm into retro handhelds and didn't even know these existed.
same. this is insaneeee. (i love tiny things like these lol)
It's, straight up, just a flash drive. There is nothing notable about the tiny thing physically.@@DrGooseDuckman
@@n0vi thanks coach 😂
Usb flashdrive 'mini PCs' used to be popular a couple years ago. This is similar in concept-ish
@@damearstor2120 they still exist! theyre even bigger!
Where did you get this?
I would be interested in a convenience product like this full of roms…. If they were later-gen roms. I have a library of nes, snes, gb, gbc, gba, roms… I’m having trouble downloading larger roms for ps2, Xbox, n64, Wii, and stuff like that. Also I’m having trouble figuring out how to do multi disc games. Is there a product with that sort of thing sorted out for a novice like me?
I love my RetroFE build!!!! I slopped mine onto a 2TB external seagate drive bruh
What is the lowest sort of system specs one might get by with to play up through N64/DC games on this?
I have a Tiny larkbox pro Celeron j4125 9th gen with 6 GB RAM and it runs up to Dreamcast and psp up to 3x res
What is that screen you are using plugged into the mini PC?
Looks similar to a surface 8 or asus rog flow screen
@@thanksyoutubefortakingmyhandle thanks I look that up. I didn’t think you could connect something to the surface 8 and use it as a display? I have been debating on getting a portable screen to take with me places for down time. I have a Steam Deck and xsx and switch and stuff but if I want to play something higher end it would be nice to have a screen. Or for when my wife is playing games on the TV and I want to play Starfield or baldurs gate lol!
@@thanksyoutubefortakingmyhandle also if you have recommendations that I should check out. I have xsx, ps5, deck, switch, surface book 2 (nvidia 1060) and I hate remote play so I don’t mind hauling my xsx or ps5 somewhere. I’ve been on the fence looking at getting the ASUS zeph g14 4060 (it think) but also don’t really want to spend that much money getting another computer. But I’m starting to build quiet a big Steam library so I think a computer is in my future.
What version of Batocera is best to use after a dual-core AMD processor and an old ATI AMD graphics card?
Nice vid! Would it work with the XU10 hand held?
dude when we will se am indepth review of the ayaneo kun?
You shouodnd3finitly review some other ones that might be better quality without all the system padding and such. I'd love to see some others on possibly bigger drives that might actually have room for a good ps3 library and such
Can you copy the 128gb usb key to a bigger one, so to have more space available?
How do yo fix the orientation issue on main menu screen?.. same thing happens on my steam deck🤦🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️
If you update to Batocera 37, it will be fixed by default. If you are still having issues, check the rotation option inside the system settings menu.
What's the last mini laptop style computer you were demoing? That thing looks amazing.
Gpd win mini
Where'd you get that switch keychain? It's so cute! I need one lol
Taki how I back up or clone micro sd cart I just purchased?
hmm didnt know batocera were the ones selling the usb drives with the pirated games lol thats a new for me cuz thats what you said right?
I think I could use this with my steamdeck. Could you make a tutorial how to make this kind of USB drive from stock?
lots of tutorials - the Batocera wiki is awesome or you can look up Batocera Nation.
retro arch is on steam deck
RetroGameCorps has a pretty great guide on his channel on how to do this exact thing. He also has his guide available online on his website
you can change the color palete by pressing L and R shoulder buttons while in the game :)
These just scream malware.
Can you extract the ROMS to use them with other emulators?
can you copy the drive to a bigger 1 and add to the games ?
Use the USB drive to boot Batoceta and you can set up another hard drive for your ROMs