More Retrogaming Fun with Batocera

My colleague Noah Dorsett turned me on to Batocera a few weeks back, and over the holiday break I took some time to install it and mess around—and I’m glad I did! Batocera is an open-source and completely free retro-gaming distribution in the vein of Retropie, but not limited to a Raspberry Pi. My son could run it on his brand new Steamdeck—I’m just not so sure he would 🙂

“Why is this thing called Batocera?” – Because the creator of this project is an enthusiastic entomologist , and his son’s favorite insect is a batocera .

-From the homepage of the Batocera wiki.

The video below takes you through setting up Batocera on a Raspberry Pi 4. The installation is pretty simple, just be sure to use balenaEtcher and not the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash the SD card to avoid partition errors.

Given Retropie hasn’t had a major release since 2022, I was wondering if those folks might be taking a well deserved break. I have no doubt building something like Retropie (not to mention managing the community) is a Herculean task, so it’ll be interesting to see if they return. In the interim, the Batocera project has been gaining steam, so I figured it might be worth exploring.

Game-by-game options

First impressions are the interface definitely seems a bit more modern compared to Retropie. You can interact with individual games to delete files and scrape media seamlessly. And with Advanced Game Options you manage game-by-game video, aspect ration,  and audio settings which is quite useful.

Advanced Game Options

Much of this still existed in Retropie, but the menu system for interfacing on a per-game basis is much more intuitive and elegant.

Atari 2600 Box Display in Batocera

I know that Retropie had media scraping for games available, but given the interface I never really dug in. With Batocera I was able to use API calls from the amazing screenscraper.fr to get a wide variety of media for my games in one fell swoop. My advice is to sign-up for an account with screenscraper.fr and don’t waste your time with the other options given there is no comparison in terms of quality and breadth of results. I have my Atari console games displaying as the original boxes, which is everything! You have quite a range of options for displaying the games, and the range of themes is pretty impressive, although I’m sticking with the default theme because it is very much in the spirit of Retropie. In fact, it’s clear the developer of Batocera was very much inspired by Retropie.

Atari 5200 Box Display in Batocera

Another cool feature of Batocera is the system let’s you know when the BIOS files you need for a specific emulator are not installed. This is quite useful when emulating systems like Atari 5200 (and many others) that require one or more BIOS files, so it’s a definite bonus to have this information right in the interface.

Missing BIOS file warning

One of the struggles I’ve had with Retropie is getting the various flavors of MAME to run. MAME is a deeply complex system that at this point emulates tens of thousands of games, and I use just a small fraction for Golden Age games like Pac-man, Donkey Kong, etc. Out of the box Batocera manages several distributions such as MAME 2003plus (0.78plus), MAME 2010 (0.139), and the most current MAME release. In fact, I was pushed to try out Batocera when I kept failing to get the most current MAME package working on Retropie, a requirement for emulating early 80s handheld games. The reason they keep around older versions like MAME 2003 and 2010 is to avoid some of the unnecessary complexities later versions might introduce.

Emulator options built-in to Advanced Options on a game-by-game basis

To Batocera’s credit, it made loading and running handhelds pretty easy. Through a bit of trial and error I figured out the handhelds work best when added to the /roms/gameandwatch folder. I got Mattel’s Dungeons & Dragons handheld working, and I can confirm it is just as confounding as it was back in 1981.

Mattel’s Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Handheld from 1981 plays well in Batocera

The dual screen Donkey Kong handheld from Ninetendo is quite fun, and it is quite fun, and like with Dungeons and Dragons, I like the way the folks who ported these made the buttons interactive—it adds to an experience that is quite hard to reproduce.

The Two-Screen Donkey Kong handheld is one of the best I got working

I did manage to get the classic Coleco Donkey Kong miniature cabinet handheld to work, but had no luck with Galaxian or Pac-man, will have to revisit those. I also have not been able to locate roms for the Zaxxon handheld, which is such an odd choice for a handheld, was Zaxxon really that popular?

The classic Coleco Donkey Kong handheld worked, although experience very different

I have finally been able to get the mini composite out on the raspberry pi working well for Retropie (more on that in my next post), but composite out for Batocera has not worked for me yet, but I will revisit these instructions soon.

Conan: Hall of Volta C64 game on the Batocera

Dealing with VICE, the C64 emulation engine, can be tricky given it might require a keyboard for various commands. In particular, I have run into issue changing disks for multi disk games like Conan: Hall of Volta. I do like that Batocera has a couple of built-in methods that allow you to do this from the gamepad of the menu, making navigating that emulator quite a bit easier. The C64 emulation wiki page provides a guide for just this and more. The wiki has proved quite useful as I’ve been navigating my way around this project, and they are using Dokuwiki which is pretty cool to see—the old web lives!

The Champ Games arcade version of Lady Bug on the Atari 2600 emulator in Batocera

I tried out some of the Champ Games ROM files, but those did not work consistently. The games with save functions and seemingly updated features would not work well. Turns out Batocera defaults to Stella2014, and if I recall correctly the 3DS version of Stella made sure all these Champ Games worked cleanly given they didn’t with Stella 2014, so that is a bummer. On the bright side I can still play them on the 3dS.

Disable Kodi Media Center from System Settings Menu

I haven’t really used the Kodi Media Player built into the Batocera, but it kept on coming up at the top of one of the menus I was using, which caused me to mistakenly get pushed into it a few times. More annoying was there was no easy way go back, so I would have to restart the system. Eventually I just disabled the Kodi Media Player in the config.txt file to spare myself that annoyance, apart from that the interface is just wonderful in the Batocera.

In my zeal and copious free time I recorded a video wherein I walk through some of the elements and features described above, as well as showing-off a few of the emulated handheld games—which are pretty fun. I’m not sure this will appeal to anyone, but once it’s been created it needs somewhere to live.