Batocera 40 is finally available on the Anbernic RG35XXH. Anbernic, please, I beg of you, call them something simple. Name this one John, give it an unofficial name at least, so the rest of the world can have an easier time. But Batocera 40 is really something, this is officially peak eye candy for any game frontend lovers out there. But I do have some problems with it, and the annoyances that I do have are so big and so well, by definition annoying, that I'm not sure whether I would want to keep this. I mean don't get me wrong, it's beautiful, but so was your ex-wife at one point and you sure as heck can't stand her now. So should we really commit to this interface and custom firmware? Well, it really depends on the kind of person that you are. Let me explain. Look, I think we can all agree on the fact that this is the best looking custom firmware that we have for this handheld. And nobody is gonna deny this. This is hands down, in terms of eye candy, the best thing that you can get, scraping your ROMs for media, is super easy on Batocera. And it really gives you that arcade cabinet look that I guess most of us wanted. I mean just look at this, just look at how beautiful Soul Reaver is represented. But there are a few things that really make me hate this. So let's talk about them. The road that I had to take to properly install Batocera 40 and to make it run just the way that I would expect it to was nothing short but a perilous and exhausting road. And you need to find out about all of this if you're ever tempted on putting this neurotic level of sheer eye candy in your $60 handheld. Using Battocera is very easy, you just take the image file from the link that I'll put in the description, you unzip it, you use Rufus or any other disk image tool, you burn it onto your SD card, you plop the SD card inside the first slot of the Anbernic RG35XXH, and congrats, you installed Batocera 40 on your card. But the thing is that this, along with a lot of custom firmwares I would say, is that they barely work and you end up breaking things, the second you stray off the path and you try to do something that your customization thirsty brain would want to do. In my case the first thing that I did to mess up Batocera 40 was to go into PPSSPP, because Battocera has a standalone version of this emulator, and I went in the settings and I saw "Oh my god, I can change the renderer from OpenGL to Vulkan". Nobody knows Vulkan gives better performance, so monkey see monkey do I switched it to Vulkan. And guess what happened, each and every time I tried starting a PSP game it would just crash on startup, so I tried to fix it. But there's no settings for standalone emulators nowhere in Batocera, so I went on and re-installed it on the SD card, not once, not twice, but three times, because that's how long it took me in my stupidity to figure out that PPSSPP for some reason saves its settings on the secondary card, and this meant that I wiped the whole freaking custom firmware three times and PPSSPP still refused to boot. So I went on the secondary SD card, I found the configuration file, I deleted it, thus forcing the emulator to create another one on boot, but needless to say this was not a friendly welcome to Battocera. The second thing that I can say that I'm really a fan of is that nothing is quite easy to find here. Usually my flow is that if I like a game out of the millions of games that I cough cough legitimately own, and which I put on handhelds like these, is that I favorite them so that I have a short list of the things that I want to jump into. Battocera has a favorite section as well, there it is, but in case you're let's say at the Master System and you don't know in which direction to go, you just end up scrolling at infinitum until you find the freaking favorite section, and we're not, there it is. And then you have to go in it, and then you have to scroll each and every game, and I don't know, maybe I'm just a princess, but I don't want to have to do 20 clicks to reach the thing that I want to play. No matter how beautiful it looks, this is a clunky user experience. If they have a hotkey to reach favorites faster than that would be perfect, but maybe... I'm missing it. In case there's a hotkey, ignore what I said about the favorites part. And last but not least, I realized a very sad and painful fact when having Battocera 40 on the RG35XXH, and that is that this UI is just not meant to be here. You can stick a Hummer engine inside a Volkswagen Beetle, but in that moment you just created an abomination that shouldn't exist, we shouldn't have this heavy of a software on such a device. This theme is actually pretty decent, but if you go into the theme store and download any other theme, then you quickly realize that three and a half inches are simply not enough. It might look acceptable because I'm very close to the camera right now, but when you hold it in your hands and when you try to play, you simply have to squint, you know? You have to put pressure on your eyes in order to see all of the details. Look at this, try reading that super small text for more than 5 minutes, or try figuring out what the hell's happening on that bottom bar over there. But to be fair, some of them really do look nice, so it really depends on the kind of user that you are. If you really like eye candy, then you will be perfectly happy with Batocera 40. It's a very customizable custom firmware, you can pretty much customize it to hell and back, but from my experience you can easily mess things up with this configuration. So I would advise, at least until this particular custom firmware matures, to only go into it if you really know what you're doing. But the good thing is that the very long boot times have apparently been fixed, because it used to take more than a minute for this to boot, and now it boots in 30 seconds, give or take, which is immensely better than before, but still not as better as MustardOS / MuOS. Do I think this custom firmware has an audience? Oh hell yeah. And I think many people will be happy with it. Personally though, I think I'm gonna stick with MuOS for a while longer, but I see how this might be the first and single best decision for a lot of people, because objectively speaking I haven't seen a more sexy custom firmware in my entire life. And I have to give credit, it's really quite an achievement. So tell me, on which camp are you? Are you on the Batocera camp? Are you on the Stock Firmware camp? Or are you on the MuOS camp? Or are you just tired from tinkering and you just want to sell this device and move in a cave somewhere very high in the mountains where nobody, nobody will ever fester you again and you would have survived in society way more if this freaking handheld wouldn't have overloaded you. Really isolating yourself in the mountains really doesn't sound like a bad idea. At least for me, my dream is to eventually buy a cabin and move in the middle of the woods. But for that I think I have to push another 2000 videos. So tell me what you think. This wasn't really a review, it was more of an end. I'm really curious on where you stand with this. Tell me your thoughts below. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. If you like what I do and want to help this channel out, consider becoming a member, Super Nerds and Up end up on this wall of fame right here which is featured in each and every video that I do. And if you stuck around up until the end of the clip, I love you for this. Please don't forget to subscribe. The channel is super small and it would be a pleasure to see it grow. I wanted to grow at least half as much as my desire to live society and live in a cabin. But until then, my sweet, sweet, sweet nerds. See you next time.
