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.
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.
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.
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!
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
To be fair the leaps in technology from a 16bit, 2d only, system to the fucking Xbox and ps2 is an insane difference. Way more of a leap than has been made from ps3/360 to now. Games still look similar. I mean fucking the last of us was on ps3, halo 4 on 360, gtav was on both! I don't think just comparing the years a thing was released is a fair assessment of what is and isn't "retro" the leap from ps2/xbox to now is significant. Things look significantly less janky.
A good 10+ years is what I would call a game a “classic” and a old gen system like the PS3 and PS4 as “retro”. It’s subjective ofc, some say 20 years, others 30, like the PS1 which will turn 30 later this year.
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
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.
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.
@@ChampagneOppa 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.
@@ChampagneOppa Trusted websites have a lower risk of having a virus than buying a random USB with ROMS imo, I'd never plug a random unknown USB into my PC
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.
@@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 RUclips 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.
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
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
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
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.
@@peterstaklis3712 My rule of thumb is every North America release for all consoles post industry collapse plus Atari consoles and then for arcade I actually tested each game. Some the video or picture was enough to remove.
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.
@@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+?????
@@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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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"
That was my thoughts when the internet came out. All information for free, in the palm of my hand. Yet, society is still brainwashed to think they need a brick and mortar college. Imagine thinking you still need a console and cartridge to play a video game.
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!
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
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.
On one hand, this is great and I want to buy one. On the other, putting in random usb's purchased from random companies into my pc or any pc that can connect to the internet sounds like a BAD idea.
@@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
@@judasblewit Never used Batocera but I use Launch Box/Big Box as a front end with Retroarch acting as an emulator for each console/arcade with it's many cores and it's really simple to use. For Big Box you need to purchase a license but once purchased you can use it forever and copy it to other devices. I would look it up.
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.
These things will forever be "good enough for newbie, but you will always make a better one yourself". Worst part of it is that when you realize that you have to fix/tweak this and that, you've spent your money on it and now bunch of time. You could've saved that money and start from scratch. Going through these things is sometimes a freaking headache and it's much easier to start with clean slate. EDIT: Yeah, not to mention it's shady, unethical and technically illegal. You are paying for stolen content.
I agree except for your edit. Once these games get to a certain age, the devs stop making money and with that, my moral compass also quits working. I’m not keen on making Nintendo even richer for something I’ve purchased several times over.
@@agentmueller Moral compass doesn't change the fact that this business is illegal and doesn't help our case to make sure that companies preserve games or give us the ability to do so. I am not defending big corps and certainly not Nintendo, but that doesn't mean that distributing pirated content for profit should be preached and encouraged. I highly doubt that whoever makes these USB owns the copies for these games...even if that would help their case.
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.
I bought one of these for my steam deck just to see what it was all about. It came in a MIcroSD and was really convenient. However if you go into the backend to where you can add/remove the games. A lot of times you can see (at least in my case) their game lists. Weirdly enough, mine had a good bucket of N64, PS2, and even Switch games that I saw were all removed prior and they added different ones in their place. These are great for those who don't want to go through the hassle of Emulation set up themselves, barring the moral and legal hang ups on it. Personally I dislike the fact that it does give you an outrageous number of games, but 85% of them are either repeats on different consoles, or its complete collections for consoles from decades ago - so yeah you have 10k+ games, but like in your case, you're only getting 1-2 on dreamcast, ps2, etc. which I think a lot of people are looking for.
For a variety of reasons I can't stand massive ROM lists. I set up a batocera build and each system has around 20 games, then when I got a deck I just cloned it to a SD card. Done. 😂
I don't wanna think recent hits to the ROM preservation community means we'll have to buy these to get our ROMs. Hopefully there's a W on the horizon for us
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
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?
2:35 , you routed through VPN to speed things up .. The more hops and layers of encryption added to a download would only bottleneck speeds if it was working properly. This is what mirrors are for. With experience you can test the mirrors and which has the least latency. Another option use a faster torrent, aria2c or axel works great in the terminal depending on the type of file your downloading.
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.
Yeah, i can see the value of someone totally new to the emotion scene. But i also find it odd that there would be someone new to the emulation scene who would want to play games from commador 64. My biggest issue with something like this is they show 43k games, but there are probably 42,900 a person new to emulation will never play.
I bought an android box in 2017 and it support all the emulators i downloaded roms from Archive websites, but nothing beats the orignal consoles feel. I own all the retro consoles of Nintendo upto Switch.. and also sega and neo geo...
I would just take this thing, transfer the entire drive over to like a 1Tb thumbdrive and than use it to add my own roms to for the systems that are lacking games.
But what's the point of buying this card if you'd still have to manually add scrape the artwork for the games you're adding? And if you already have your own library of ROMs with the artwork prepped, then you may as well skip this card and build your own 1TB thumbdrive. I just don't see the point of this card, especially when easy to use solutions like EmuDeck on Steam Deck exist.
Sounds convenient but ehh, I know most won’t like what’s on there so they’ll have to scroll through the library and delete. Honestly it’s no different to finding what you want, downloading them and whatnot but more time consuming. I managed to get the games I wanted to play on my 200GB SD card to play on my Anbernic RG556. Once I get myself an ROG Ally, going for the Ally X, I’ll get a 1TB SD card for X360, PS3 and Switch games.
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?
Great review. I get the security concerns with a product like this, selling a raspberry pi solution instead would be safer, so you dont need to use your own device to boot from. Also a cheaper Pi doesnt have/need wifi & bluetooth further reducing the security threat. Bit more cost involved with a Pi vs a USB drive but still in that low cost range. How much would you pay for a full Pi solution with all the cables, pre-loaded SD card etc?
this is much safer than most other ways because it boots, you can run it on a PC without hardrive. The Pi isnt strong enough for alot of the "newer" consoles
@@nox5555 Fair point, if the target market was retro gamers though not so much need for power. Also not sure how practicle it is for your average 'Joe' non-tech person to remove a laptop hard drive (or even want to) to make it safer.
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?
@@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.
Fairly new Steam Deck owner here. I've only ever used emulation on the Ouya and I can't remember how long ago that was! I think I'm going to give this a try. It's only forty bucks. 🤷🏾♂️
Makers of these roms get around the grey areas by stating that games are free and they are paying for the drive and not the games. Still a grey area but what are we gonna do when companies are allowing game titles to just disappear into the ethos.
Its not a Grey area. If i rip a DVD and post it online for free, that's illegal. Technically game preservation websites are illegal for this same reason, but aren't really litigated on anyway because many of the studios don't care about that game or series anymore or even exist. However you will see need for speed blocked on some of them by ea and like a lot of Nintendo games from Nintendo (on websites that try to do things as legally as possible)
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?
@@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.
I've been painstakingly building my own curated retro library for just the 8 and 16 bit eras for my everdrive devices and it's taken me probably 100 hours over 3 years of grunt work. If I was going to just sell a duplicate copy I would value that effort at more than $40. just saying.
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
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.
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
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?
it's kinda tempting, just for the convenience of having all of the initial stuff taking care of. For me, guess it would just depend on how difficult it is to set games up in Batocera (only worked with standalone emulators, Retroarch on PC, and the Retroid Pocket 2+ so far).
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?
4:30 ...Me personally, I wouldn't be so quick to attribute ill-intent &/or deception with respect to some Systems having only a single game: In my opinion, it's more likely that's a placeholder to allow the Player to more quickly & easily expand that System by populating it with more games (without having to go into the settings & _CREATE_ that System first).
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.
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
I LOVE how you actually show how to customize some settings.
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!
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
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.
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
To be fair the leaps in technology from a 16bit, 2d only, system to the fucking Xbox and ps2 is an insane difference. Way more of a leap than has been made from ps3/360 to now. Games still look similar. I mean fucking the last of us was on ps3, halo 4 on 360, gtav was on both! I don't think just comparing the years a thing was released is a fair assessment of what is and isn't "retro" the leap from ps2/xbox to now is significant. Things look significantly less janky.
So technically PES 2023 is a retro game?
A good 10+ years is what I would call a game a “classic” and a old gen system like the PS3 and PS4 as “retro”. It’s subjective ofc, some say 20 years, others 30, like the PS1 which will turn 30 later this year.
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
🤨
I’m sure you could very easily just delete the libraries of half the consoles on here that you wouldn’t play anyways and have plenty of space.
@@Return2TheLiving Or just buy a much larger capacity blank USB-drive and copy the entire Batocera drive over to it using a PC/laptop
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.
Do you have a link to the drive and reviews?
I've never talked to a man living in the mountains...
So are there a lot of dangerous animals up there ?
@Brc-kg1mg we see coyotes and bears once in awhile. But mostly just deer.
@@philipadams3325 did you learn the fus roo dah yet? Joke.. im genuinely jealous and happy of your home.
Ah, the modern rendition of 99999 in 1 cartridges.
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?
@@ChampagneOppa
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
@@ChampagneOppa Trusted websites have a lower risk of having a virus than buying a random USB with ROMS imo, I'd never plug a random unknown USB into my PC
I spent a week getting all the games I wanted from SNES to PS2 and with 250gb I got all the games I wanted.
I did that. And just left. Don't play much lol
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 RUclips 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.
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.
@@rowshanara3122you’d have to have your os installed on that flash drive and boot from it.
This is AWESOME! We need those as form of game preservation!
the GPD mini looks awesome but starting at around $1000 AUD is insane
Some people actually enjoy the process of curating a collection
Where would I start to get more information for doing this?
Man, Taki! How do you not have 100k? You're content is amazing!
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
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
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.
@@peterstaklis3712 My rule of thumb is every North America release for all consoles post industry collapse plus Atari consoles and then for arcade I actually tested each game. Some the video or picture was enough to remove.
Ok
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.
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.
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"
You could do that if you go 15 years back lmao
That was my thoughts when the internet came out. All information for free, in the palm of my hand. Yet, society is still brainwashed to think they need a brick and mortar college. Imagine thinking you still need a console and cartridge to play a video game.
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
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
thanks Taki, i created my own drive awhile back but i may get this as a backup system.
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
If you're looking for a full Batocera system with a highly curated game list, I do some really nice builds for Umbrella Arcades.
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.
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
On one hand, this is great and I want to buy one. On the other, putting in random usb's purchased from random companies into my pc or any pc that can connect to the internet sounds like a BAD idea.
Thank you for the video, I just ordered one!
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?
@@judasblewit Never used Batocera but I use Launch Box/Big Box as a front end with Retroarch acting as an emulator for each console/arcade with it's many cores and it's really simple to use. For Big Box you need to purchase a license but once purchased you can use it forever and copy it to other devices. I would look it up.
Marketing plug and play then having to boot up BIOS to get it to work is mental.
1 game for gamecube is a crime
Ive lost this darn thing three times!!!! Ive now attached a lanyard to it!
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.
These things will forever be "good enough for newbie, but you will always make a better one yourself".
Worst part of it is that when you realize that you have to fix/tweak this and that, you've spent your money on it and now bunch of time. You could've saved that money and start from scratch.
Going through these things is sometimes a freaking headache and it's much easier to start with clean slate.
EDIT: Yeah, not to mention it's shady, unethical and technically illegal. You are paying for stolen content.
I agree except for your edit. Once these games get to a certain age, the devs stop making money and with that, my moral compass also quits working. I’m not keen on making Nintendo even richer for something I’ve purchased several times over.
@@agentmueller Moral compass doesn't change the fact that this business is illegal and doesn't help our case to make sure that companies preserve games or give us the ability to do so.
I am not defending big corps and certainly not Nintendo, but that doesn't mean that distributing pirated content for profit should be preached and encouraged. I highly doubt that whoever makes these USB owns the copies for these games...even if that would help their case.
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.
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.
I bought one of these for my steam deck just to see what it was all about. It came in a MIcroSD and was really convenient. However if you go into the backend to where you can add/remove the games. A lot of times you can see (at least in my case) their game lists. Weirdly enough, mine had a good bucket of N64, PS2, and even Switch games that I saw were all removed prior and they added different ones in their place. These are great for those who don't want to go through the hassle of Emulation set up themselves, barring the moral and legal hang ups on it. Personally I dislike the fact that it does give you an outrageous number of games, but 85% of them are either repeats on different consoles, or its complete collections for consoles from decades ago - so yeah you have 10k+ games, but like in your case, you're only getting 1-2 on dreamcast, ps2, etc. which I think a lot of people are looking for.
For a variety of reasons I can't stand massive ROM lists. I set up a batocera build and each system has around 20 games, then when I got a deck I just cloned it to a SD card. Done. 😂
I don't wanna think recent hits to the ROM preservation community means we'll have to buy these to get our ROMs. Hopefully there's a W on the horizon for us
I love my RetroFE build!!!! I slopped mine onto a 2TB external seagate drive bruh
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
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?
2:35 , you routed through VPN to speed things up .. The more hops and layers of encryption added to a download would only bottleneck speeds if it was working properly. This is what mirrors are for. With experience you can test the mirrors and which has the least latency. Another option use a faster torrent, aria2c or axel works great in the terminal depending on the type of file your downloading.
Great video! Does this work on Retroid or Anbernic products?
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!
These just scream malware.
8:05 “Newer Device” Bios looks like something from the early 2000s lol. I thought a PC Handheld would have a nice flashy bios tbh
when i was a kid bugs life from disney on n64 was the beez knees
you can change the color palete by pressing L and R shoulder buttons while in the game :)
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.
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
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.
SteamDeck NEEDS a USB A port.
Copying the Win 4 6800U IO would be perfection.
Just use an adapter
Yeah, i can see the value of someone totally new to the emotion scene. But i also find it odd that there would be someone new to the emulation scene who would want to play games from commador 64. My biggest issue with something like this is they show 43k games, but there are probably 42,900 a person new to emulation will never play.
cannot wait for my gpd mini :D
Cool, I ended up spending days working on downloads Etc realizing that I couldn't use them in the format I downloaded them in
great breakdown!
upgrading from batocera 35 to 37 is a royal pain in the butt.
I bought an android box in 2017 and it support all the emulators i downloaded roms from Archive websites, but nothing beats the orignal consoles feel. I own all the retro consoles of Nintendo upto Switch.. and also sega and neo geo...
That Gundam Skin is awesome
Can confirm this works on an older Chromebook as well. Acer Spin 11 inch. No lagging or hiccups.
I would just take this thing, transfer the entire drive over to like a 1Tb thumbdrive and than use it to add my own roms to for the systems that are lacking games.
But what's the point of buying this card if you'd still have to manually add scrape the artwork for the games you're adding? And if you already have your own library of ROMs with the artwork prepped, then you may as well skip this card and build your own 1TB thumbdrive. I just don't see the point of this card, especially when easy to use solutions like EmuDeck on Steam Deck exist.
Sounds convenient but ehh, I know most won’t like what’s on there so they’ll have to scroll through the library and delete. Honestly it’s no different to finding what you want, downloading them and whatnot but more time consuming.
I managed to get the games I wanted to play on my 200GB SD card to play on my Anbernic RG556. Once I get myself an ROG Ally, going for the Ally X, I’ll get a 1TB SD card for X360, PS3 and Switch games.
What's the last mini laptop style computer you were demoing? That thing looks amazing.
Gpd win mini
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
I just do my own batocera builds and give them out to friends as gifts.
Just make your own custom drive with Retroarch and Launchbox. Done deal.
Nice vid! Would it work with the XU10 hand held?
Yay tiny switch keychain 😁
Great review. I get the security concerns with a product like this, selling a raspberry pi solution instead would be safer, so you dont need to use your own device to boot from. Also a cheaper Pi doesnt have/need wifi & bluetooth further reducing the security threat. Bit more cost involved with a Pi vs a USB drive but still in that low cost range. How much would you pay for a full Pi solution with all the cables, pre-loaded SD card etc?
this is much safer than most other ways because it boots, you can run it on a PC without hardrive.
The Pi isnt strong enough for alot of the "newer" consoles
@@nox5555 Fair point, if the target market was retro gamers though not so much need for power. Also not sure how practicle it is for your average 'Joe' non-tech person to remove a laptop hard drive (or even want to) to make it safer.
many nregative reviews on that amazon listing. Also the listing was taken down
So many great games, I hate feeling like I’ve ripped someone off but if I cant buy it I’m getting it one way or the other..
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.
Can you copy this usb to a larger one to make room for more games???
Lets test the drive, but before dat I'm change some, download some, delete some and tweak some... Best review ever!
lol?
Fairly new Steam Deck owner here. I've only ever used emulation on the Ouya and I can't remember how long ago that was!
I think I'm going to give this a try. It's only forty bucks. 🤷🏾♂️
Makers of these roms get around the grey areas by stating that games are free and they are paying for the drive and not the games. Still a grey area but what are we gonna do when companies are allowing game titles to just disappear into the ethos.
That's not a grey area though, they're making it up. Being free doesn't make it less infringing.
Its not a Grey area. If i rip a DVD and post it online for free, that's illegal. Technically game preservation websites are illegal for this same reason, but aren't really litigated on anyway because many of the studios don't care about that game or series anymore or even exist. However you will see need for speed blocked on some of them by ea and like a lot of Nintendo games from Nintendo (on websites that try to do things as legally as possible)
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.
I've been painstakingly building my own curated retro library for just the 8 and 16 bit eras for my everdrive devices and it's taken me probably 100 hours over 3 years of grunt work. If I was going to just sell a duplicate copy I would value that effort at more than $40. just saying.
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.
I wonder if it will work 2 with Bluetooth controllers?
Should offer a bumped up drive at maybe $80. Double the storage, and games and leave some space to spare for updates
I only understood about 1 in 4 words. Botacera, 37, scraping things... feels like more effort than it is worth!
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
Ok that's cool and all. But where did you get the Gundam skin/shell/case for the steam deck?
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?
Holy moly😮
I'd rather make it myself. Took me a few days to gather everyting but once I did it was very easy and took about a day to put everything together.
I had gigs worth if ROMs, everything lots them all, don't ask, 40 bucks hell yeah to get them back.
Easy to get the stuff it don't have then :).
it's kinda tempting, just for the convenience of having all of the initial stuff taking care of. For me, guess it would just depend on how difficult it is to set games up in Batocera (only worked with standalone emulators, Retroarch on PC, and the Retroid Pocket 2+ so far).
Would love to hear your opinion on Coin-Ops
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
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?
4:30 ...Me personally, I wouldn't be so quick to attribute ill-intent &/or deception with respect to some Systems having only a single game: In my opinion, it's more likely that's a placeholder to allow the Player to more quickly & easily expand that System by populating it with more games (without having to go into the settings & _CREATE_ that System first).
I am sorry for the off topic, but what kind of screen are you using? Looking for some decent panel.
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?
Instead of deleting games, could you copy everything into a bigger sdcard and then upgrade to have more space?