I remember spending 2 days downloading 1 rom on dialup....

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.

PS3 is also a retro system now. It's 15 years old. Just like 1988's Genesis was already retro in 2003.

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 LOVE how you actually show how to customize some settings.

Wow. You're just so damned thorough. What an incredible video/review. Instant SUBSCRIBE.

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

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"

Bactocera is amazing I’ve turned so many old pcs into amazing gaming systems

Ah, the modern rendition of 99999 in 1 cartridges.

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 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

This is AWESOME! We need those as form of game preservation!

I spent a week getting all the games I wanted from SNES to PS2 and with 250gb I got all the games I wanted.

Who wouldn't mind stuffing a USB stick, from who knows where, into their own computer?

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.

the GPD mini looks awesome but starting at around $1000 AUD is insane

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!

Man, Taki! How do you not have 100k? You're content is amazing!

I would be concerned about malware, trojan and viruses on these things. Did you do any security checks?

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

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="155">2:35</a> , 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.

The handhelds you show off are so cool! I wish I was rich enough to own a PC handheld. 😅

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.

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 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.

when i was a kid bugs life from disney on n64 was the beez knees

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

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

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.

Some people actually enjoy the process of curating a collection

1 game for gamecube is a crime

If you're looking for a full Batocera system with a highly curated game list, I do some really nice builds for Umbrella Arcades.

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

I'm kinda impressed by how polished this looks. I half expected it to be a straight up scam.

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.

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?

Marketing plug and play then having to boot up BIOS to get it to work is mental.

Thank you for the video, I just ordered one!

Wow, I'm into retro handhelds and didn't even know these existed.

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

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.

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?

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?

100% legit games man, I agree.

many nregative reviews on that amazon listing. Also the listing was taken down

...for the ease...What is your favorite drive that has the largest collection of ROMs? I like this, but would there be a better deal with a different device that might boast more games, with more of a chance to have more of the top-tier games I'd want to play?

I am sorry for the off topic, but what kind of screen are you using? Looking for some decent panel.

I wouldn't mind one of these all pre-set up with just Arcade games like some of the Pi builds you can find.

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

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.

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.

SteamDeck NEEDS a USB A port. Copying the Win 4 6800U IO would be perfection.

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.

you can change the color palete by pressing L and R shoulder buttons while in the game :)

What's the last mini laptop style computer you were demoing? That thing looks amazing.

Just wanted to warn some people that one of the other listings by this company has reviews showing that one of their other drives flagged a trojan.

Ive lost this darn thing three times!!!! Ive now attached a lanyard to it!

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.

Should offer a bumped up drive at maybe $80. Double the storage, and games and leave some space to spare for updates

Great video! Does this work on Retroid or Anbernic products?

Just make your own custom drive with Retroarch and Launchbox. Done deal.

TLDW; No, download a romset yourself, put them on the right folders and set up Batocera to your own liking, which is what youre gonna have to do with this incomplete hash up anyhow. Shysters msking money outta open source software, not even bothering to do the leg work.

These just scream malware.

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?

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?

it's insane to me how people spend a premium just to get abandonedware on a storage device.

Can confirm this works on an older Chromebook as well. Acer Spin 11 inch. No lagging or hiccups.

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.

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.

Ok that's cool and all. But where did you get the Gundam skin/shell/case for the steam deck?

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.

Not worth it. Largest usb drive you can find, or m.2 usb enclosure and m.2 drive. Flash batocera to that, let it do what it wants. In settings, you can tell it to use other external drives for roms. But you're on your own for bios and rom downloads. 🏴‍☠️

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.

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.

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.

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

great breakdown! upgrading from batocera 35 to 37 is a royal pain in the butt.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="270">4:30</a> ...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'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.

Could you copy the image to a larger drive to expand sets without bothering the settings?

I love my RetroFE build!!!! I slopped mine onto a 2TB external seagate drive bruh

I am just miffed that these people have a pre-made pack that they're just loading onto memory cards and selling them for double / triple the price. I understand the value of time. But buying a memory card with illegal copies of games on it is different than buying a console that just so happens to have games on it already. There's a huge difference in the eyes of the law.

Cool, I ended up spending days working on downloads Etc realizing that I couldn't use them in the format I downloaded them in

Yay tiny switch keychain 😁

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.

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..

Lol, “plug and play” that setup was more than that.

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 only understood about 1 in 4 words. Botacera, 37, scraping things... feels like more effort than it is worth!

Would love to hear your opinion on Coin-Ops

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.

You could not pay me to plug that into my pc

No need to delete video games. On your pc download the update and then plug in your batocera drive. A drive labeled boot will appear you will copy and paste the update files to this boot. First delete the old files since you don't have enough space there are two available downloads from batocera...don't get the ISO but the other. This is how you downgrade as well. Batocera is the best

Could you boot that from the SD card slot of the steam deck as well? :o That would be awesome!

Does it have to run through BIOS or can you use Windows?

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

My concern about these things is they are being sold by a company that clearly doesn’t care about breaking laws, is there anything in the os that has been modified to steal data and send it back to whoever made the device? If I ever used one of these you’d bet you ass it would be running on a device that has nothing on it besides this and no internet connection.

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?

hey @TakiUdon , could you tell me why Batocera will not work on my nVidia Shield?