The BEST Portable Emulation System EVER! (RetroBat)

these emulation drives are pretty popular they come pre-loaded with all the emulation front end and all the games and emulators all pre-configured and ready to rock but you don't need to buy one of these to have an awesome emulation drive you could steal one or you could make your own I guess and then maybe I'll show you how to do that sometime if you uh if you ask me nicely what what's that you want me to show you how to do that right now well okay since you asked so nicely [Music] hello hi there hi techs we welcome thanks for clicking on the video today it has come to my attention that you're interested in Retro Gaming you want to play your favorite old video games for when you were a kid but like a kid you're lost and confused and hungry well I can't help you with your hunger it'll be dinner time soon if you've already had enough sex today and I don't want you to spoil your dinner but I can help you with your hunger for retro games I make lots of videos about retro head helds and nebulation consoles and if you're into that sort of thing you should probably subscribe but what a very popular product that I've showed off quite a bit are emulation hard drives I like uh several of these uh quite a bit but none of these have been quite perfect enough for me is it because my standards are just so high that I'll never be satisfied just like how I am with girlfriends or or root beer oh or is it because of the real reason which is because what one person wants in a nebulation drive is different from another person I've been on the hunt for the perfect emulation Drive I've looked high and low and I've cried myself to sleep on too many nights and you know what I'm tired of looking I'm taking matters into my own dweebie heads I'm gonna make my own emulation drive and you can do it too it's super easy it barely takes anything to get started and you can follow by steps and have your own perfect emulation Drive tailored to your tastes your uh unique tastes but before we get into baking the drive oh one thing we should probably address is why someone would want an external emulation Drive I mean can't you just run retro games through emulators on your computer well yeah you can do that if you want but having all your ROMs and emulators and front end on a portable drive has lots of advantages for one thing you can bring your game collection between compute and it'll be all set up and ready to go so you don't need to install emulators on every system that you want a game on and also the save games it's annoying to have multiple save files on multiple systems because then you're stuck copying the save file over when you want to play on the different system or just playing that game on the on that one system a dedicated emulation Drive solves that because you can just play the games with your save files right off the drive and also having it on a drive means you don't need to store it on your PC if you have several terabytes of ROMs then you can just keep that on the drive and keep your internal storage free for other stuff so assuming you're with me and you want to make your own nebulation Drive the first thing you need to ask yourself is what would the perfect emulation Drive mean to me dot dot me you what is it your perfect emulation Drive look like and because I know it's a big daunting question I'm going to divide this into three categories the form factor the system and the games so for the form factor of the storage drive itself well this is this one's pretty straightforward what size and shape of emulation Drive do you want an emulation Drive could be any source of external storage so it could be an SD card or a USB thumb drive or an external hard drive and you'll need to think about the amount of storage on the drive it could be any capacity really but the amount of higher end games will be dictated by how much storage you actually have I'll include a link in the description below to a few storage options at good prices that I recommend I'm going with this it's a four terabyte Seagate Xbox themed hard drive and it has green lights on it which means it's for gamers only Gamers know that joke and I'll include a link to this one in the description below if you want this one too as for the system well there are several options first we could go with bottocera which is a standalone Linux operating system made for abilation it runs emulation station as the front end and the Cubs pre-installed with all the emulators that you need however this is a full operating system which means that you need to use this drive as a boot Drive which is a downside in my opinion because sometimes you don't want to reboot the computer to play Super Mario World come on though and then uh you could go with retro bat which is basically the same thing as bottocera except that it runs in Windows it's like a Windows bottle Sarah program so again you're going to be using emulation station that we get the themes and the game libraries and it comes with a nice easy installer that sets everything up for you including most of the emulators and it can automatically download other emulators as you need them and then there are other emulator Asian front ends that I admittedly don't have a ton of experience with there is Launch Box in big big box that I know a lot of people like and I I'm sure there are other emulation front ends out there but I'm not going to go over every possible option in this video my suggestion and what I'm going to be using today is to go with retrobat this will let you get ebulation station which is my favorite Fred hood and you can move this between PCS and run to the system from Windows without needing to boot to the device like you will with bottocera and um we need to think about our game collection what sort of game Library will make you happy I mean some people want everything every single game including all the weird stuff like betas and prototypes and ROM hacks and stuff some people want all the games from their favorite systems but they just want one copy of every game and only English games and some people want their own best of Library so my suggestion is to use this portable drive as your opportunity to finally build your your own ROM library and start collecting just the Rob sets that suit your needs and start trimming them down and organizing them the way that you want them oh and I'll mention it now because I know I'll get some questions about it how do you find ROMs well I can't tell you that I could get in trouble my channel cookie take it down or the Nintendo lawyer ninjas will come and cut off my fingers so if you can't figure out how to find your own ROMs then I guess you're just out of luck and maybe you should Google how to spend your time doing productive things and not collecting ROM sets for your favorite systems so the first step is to set up your drive if it's a new drive just plug it in and make sure that it's recognized by Windows and you'll be good to go if it's an old drive just make sure that you have enough free space to install everything retrobat itself and the emulators takes up about 1.5 gigabytes which isn't much so just make sure that you have enough space for your ROM Library once that's done you'll need to download the Retro bad installer just go to the retrobat website retrobat.org which I will have links below and click download and uh while you're there why don't you toss a donation to The developers if you want to it's always nice to support the people making the things that you love hint hint once that's downloaded you can run the installer well when it comes time to choose your install location you should choose the drive that you have plugged in either put it on the root level of the drive or put it in its own folder like I did the install will take quite a while and then when it's done you'll be ready to test it out actually before you do that it's a good time to talk about controllers retrobat will work with pretty much any controller as long as it's compatible with Windows you can connect up a Bluetooth controller or you can plug in a USB controller you can use the keyboard to navigate retrobat or even player retro games but if you play retro games with a keyboard you're kind of a freak and I want no part of that nonsense so I'm going to assume that you have a controller of some sort I'll include a link in the description below to a super cheap uh Xbox controller that I like if you need to pick one up so go ahead and fire up retro bat you won't have much by default right now just make sure that your controller works if your controller does not work you'll want to use your keyboard and press enter Then go down to the controller settings and select it with the X key on your keyboard then go to controller mapping and it'll ask you to hold a button down on your controller do that and it should be detected and then it'll ask you to bind your controls so just hold down the button that it asks say that at the end when it asks for the hotkey I recommend setting this as the select button on your controller and that's it for this setup so now we're ready to add our games so uh in the retrobat folder on your hard drive you'll see a folder called ROMs and in here are a whole bunch of folders one for each of the supported systems so your Atari 2600 games go with the Atari 2600 folder Game Boy Advance games go in the GBA folder PS1 games go in the PS X folder that sort of thing you can figure that out when that's done you can open up retrobat again and then you'll see that all your games are Auto magically detected each system with games is shown and the menu for that system you'll see the games listed and on the lower end systems like Nintendo or Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis or whatever you'll find that the emulators and retroarch cores are all set up and ready to go no configuration needed just start up a game and boom you're playing your own favorite retro games all of the controls should automatically be pre-configured and ready to use there are also some hotkeys conveniently set up for you I've showed them on the screen but I'll include a link to the wiki that lists all the hotkeys if you need help uh figuring them out and a quick note about bios files you may need bios files for some of your systems and those go into the BIOS folder of the retrobat install however you probably won't need that many bios files maybe not any because these days the Retro large cores work pretty good without bios files so my suggestion is to just start using it and if you come across a system that needs a bios that you don't have you could grab that somehow in emulation station we have lots of options to customize the emulation experience you can turn the screen bezels on and off you can change the emulation cores or apply shaders to make the games look like the running on an old CRT monitor or in the 3D Systems you can enable upscaling to run early 3D games at enhanced resolutions lots of stuff to Tinker around with in there I believe we could also use themes to change the way that your front end looks there is a theme browser built right into retrobat and you can use that to download themes and adjust their options but most of this stuff is pretty easy to figure out so I'm not going to go into depth in this video on any of this emulation station customization stuff but I am working on an emulation station guide so get subscribed if you don't want to miss that one important part of making a very cool relation system is scraping your game art for this you'll need an account for a service called screen scraper if you signed up for the free account you get like 20 000 daily scrapes but each game requires several scrapes potentially if you you want to get the box started the logo and the screenshot or whatever which is only a few thousand games if you do that and you have a big game Library it'll take you a lot quite a few days to scrape all your art or you can do what I do and support the service by signing up for a paid account and you get way more scrapes so sign up for the account and then in retrobat you can go into the scraper option of the main menu and in here you can put in your screen scraper username and password they'd also choose which screenshot options that you want you can even do videos but keep in mind the downloading thousands of videos would take a very long time but use up lots of your storage I would only do that if you only had a small collection of games personally what I do is I just I scrape the game logo the 3D box art and the screenshot and then you could start the scraping for the whole system or just choose which systems that you want to scrape for the scraping could take a long time if you have a big Library so you might want to do what I do and just leave it running overnight and then when it comes to emulating the high-end systems you might need to download emulators for these luckily retrobat makes it super easy to do that all you need to do is fire up a game for a system and then if it doesn't have the emulator It'll ask you if you want to automatically download the emulator for that system so for example I want to play a GameCube game I just started up and then when it asks if I want to download the emulator I say heck yeah Buddy it'll download the emulator and then boom it just starts up the game how freaking easy is that I love this feature it makes just getting your entire Rob Library accessible so dang quick and easy and well that that's that's it do all that stuff in your emulation Drive will be good to go you could play this on your PC or your laptop or if you have multiple computers you can move the drive between them the best part about about all that is that your custom settings and key bindings and save games and emulators it's all part of the package so you'll have to fuss about with transferring files back and forth just to play your games if you encounter any problems there is a retro bat Wiki and frequently asked questions page that are so good so I'll link to those in the description below so my drive is basically done now and it's freaking awesome and I love it it only took me an afternoon to put together and it was fun and easy I'm not going to give you a full tour because this video has gone on long enough and I lied it's not completely done I have a few other game collections that I need to organize and add to it and trim some stuff down so maybe someday I'll give you a proper in-depth tour and show you all the options that I chose for each system but for now you'll have to figure out all those little things yourself but that's actually one of the great things about building your own Drive choosing all the specific options that appeal to your own tastes that's what we're here for right that's a big reason to make your own nebulation Drive they sell all sorts of emulation drives that you can buy do that if you just want to get something that sort of works but none of those will be perfect for you making your own is how you can get exactly what you want the perfect emulation drive it's up to you to bake it and make it perfect and I hope that the stuff I showed you today will be what you need to do that and that brings us to the end I hope you found this useful let me know if you have any questions in the comments below this video like all my videos is brought to you by the patrons of techweep if you'd like to become a patron and help support the things that I do there's a link in the description below if you like emulation content then maybe check out this video where I show you what kind of ultra high-endipulation you can do on a badass gay big PC that was a fun video there's a link to that on the screen now and at the top of the description below and that's be done for today I'm Tech tweeb thanks for watching bye thank you

Channel: TechDweeb

Views: 60,042

Keywords: techdweeb, tech, dweeb, emulator, drive, emulation, retrobat, batorcera, launchbox, hard drive, external, hyper base, jmachen, kinhank, console, pc, computer, easy, tutorial, retro bat, dreamcast, ps2, psp, ps1, psx, playstation, n64, nintendo, nes, gameboy, gba, advance, colour, snes, super, saturn, sega, genesis, mega drive, gamegear, amiga, spectrum, commodore, atari, 2600, turbografx, pc engine, gamecube, wii, ds, 3ds, switch, ps3, xbox, retro, games, retroarch, core, mame, arcade, fba, neo geo

Id: MvW_rNK3LLM

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023