Are These $40 Batocera Drives Worth Buying? - 43,000 ROMs / Plug & Play 🏴‍☠️

Amazon has a ton of retro emulation hard drives, but are they worth buying?
Gear Used

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#hyperbasemini #batocera

[ennz]

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

[snoozeflu]

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.

[richarddukard]

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.

[manoftherainshorts]

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

[bluevegas]

I LOVE how you actually show how to customize some settings.

[Weneedaplague]

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

[bananapeehole]

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

[FinalStageL]

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

[MarkDell]

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

[anonyshinki]

Ah, the modern rendition of in 1 cartridges.

[philipadams]

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.

[juggalotuz]

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

[Dtgray]

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

[BrBill]

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

[seanrm]

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.

[contingentcat]

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.

[AndroidFerret]

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

[darkvulpes]

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"

[Schatten.mensch]

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.

[topchief]

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