Turn a USB Flash Drive into a Portable Gaming "System"!

[Music] hey everyone this is ross from metro game core so the other day i made a video about the steam deck and i talked about loading badasera onto an sd card well today i'm going to show you a proof of concept with doing that with a usb flash drive now essentially we're going to put the operating system directly onto this flash drive along with all of our games and settings and everything and this is going to allow us to plug it into any other windows pc and turn it into a gaming system just like that and that's the beauty and the power of botocera now obviously this in itself is not an emulation device you're going to have to plug it into a computer so i'm calling the concept of byopc but the strength lies in the fact that you can plug this into any windows pc and automatically have all your games and settings and save games and everything else that are portable with you so you could put it on a laptop while you're on travel or if you had a small pc hooked up to your tv in the living room and then also if you had a computer in your home office all these are going to be able to run just fine using the flash drive embodisera can support all the way up through ps3 xbox and wii u games and there are various skins and themes to choose from to give yourself a unique user experience so without any further delay let's jump into this concept so obviously the first thing you're going to need is a flash drive so i picked up this 500 gigabyte sandisk flash drive for about 50 bucks you can obviously go smaller or bigger and the price is going to vary but i thought this was a happy medium i also recommend that you have a usb pluggable keyboard to work with now any keyboard will do but i really like this one here which has a mouse integrated into it it's nice and small and compact and it has a rechargeable battery inside and on top of that it has a wireless usb dongle so essentially you can just plug this into any computer and you can use this as your keyboard and your mouse it costs 20 bucks on amazon i'll leave a link in the video description below you're not going to need the keyboard all the time but it is going to be an important part of first setting up everything additionally you're going to want to have a gamepad for this exercise in particular i was using the 8bitdo pro 2. and i did that for a couple reasons one is because it has analog triggers which is really helpful when you're playing gamecube games but then also it supports wired gameplay so you can just plug in usb-c directly into the computer and just start playing without having to set up bluetooth or anything else like that but the reality is that any controller is going to work fine now just to give you a baseline of the gameplay we're going to be seeing later in this video these are the specs of my computer here long story short i have a ryzen 7 3700x and then i have a rx 590 video card i put together this computer about a year and a half ago right before the pandemic started i would say this is a middle-of-the-road gaming pc and you definitely don't need something as powerful as this but this is what i'm working with here in this video okay so now let's actually install badasera on our flash drive you're just going to want to go to the bottosera website which i'll have linked below and you're going to see various platforms that are supported by the operating system we're just going to download the regular x64 windows version it's going to be a couple gigs just go ahead and download that and then we're going to use an app called belen etcher to flash this onto the usb drive in the first window just go ahead and select flash from file find that file and hit open then go select target and then put in your usb drive and then finally just hit flash it's going to ask you do you really want to do this and you say yeah man i want to do it now this can be done on an sd card or an external hard drive i'm only doing on a flash drive just because it's so small and portable but you could use any of those if you'd like when it's done all these windows are going to pop up just go ahead and ignore all of these just hit cancel for everything until it's gone and now we're going to actually boot into that flash drive keep it plugged into your computer in your windows start menu type in recovery options and then within here you'll see a section that says advanced startup restart now then push that button and you should see something that says use a device and within here find the uefi removable device that's your usb flash drive go ahead and select that now if you don't see that option in the recovery options don't worry about it i'll show you how to access that in a different way anyway once it boots into botocera it's going to resize your flash drive partitions and then it's going to boot right into the interface now unfortunately i didn't capture that initial install so this is after i've already loaded some games on here but essentially this is how the process is going to go now let's say you didn't have the ability to pick the usb flash drive when you're in the recovery options so what you want to do is power down your computer and then power it up and then as soon as it powers up using your usb keyboard you're going to want to hit the boot menu button that's usually the f12 button but sometimes it's escape or even f2 just keep tapping that and then it'll boot into your computer's bios and it'll give you the option to pick a boot device now within here you should be able to see the uefi usb partition go ahead and select that and that's going to boot into bottosera and here we are booting right back into the interface so those are the two ways that you can boot into botocera from your computer okay so this is what the interface is gonna look like you're gonna have the ability to load all your games up if you've seen any of my other videos you'd kind of know how this all works it's an emulation station front end but one of the things that makes botocera unique is that it has its own file system and you can load all your games through this now the way you do this is you press f1 on your keyboard and that'll bring up this file system here and not only will you be able to see the stuff on the flash drive but you'll be able to see everything else that's already in the computer so for example here are the hard drives connected to my pc so i can access where i store my games on my computer and then copy all of them and then go into the roms folder of the flash drive and then paste them in so i'm essentially transferring files from the internal hard drive on my pc onto this flash drive and because there's not a lot of overhead here with operating system it actually moves over very quickly and so i found this is the easiest way to move files over now if your game files are not attached to your actual computer say they're on an external hard drive that's fine too you just plug the external hard drive into the same computer and bottosera is going to find that as well but essentially that's all you're going to have to do now let's say you're using one computer for bottasera and you have a separate computer like a mac or something else like that which has all your game files well that's also an easy fix too because you can access that over the wifi so once modisera is connected to the wi-fi on mac you just go into finder and then connect to it and on windows you go into a file explorer you just type backslash backslash bodicera and then register as a guest when you log in and then you'll have access to your file structure of the flash drive so then you can move everything over at will now another thing that's important with a lot of these games are the bios files and in botocera you can actually go in and see all the missing bios files under the game settings so here you can make note of all the missing bios files now unfortunately i can't say where to get the bios files but i would recommend maybe googling the words bottosera and bios and see what you find and you move these files over just like you do the game files you just move them into the bios folder instead okay so now that we've moved over a bunch of our game files and the bios files let's actually start up a game and see what it's like and i've been showing one certain game recently a lot in my videos so let's try a completely different one here and one i've never shown on this channel before now starting up this random game here you can see two things one it has these nice bezels that are around the screen itself and also that the image is a little bit soft now fixing the soft image is actually fairly easy we're going to do that in the bottom menu we're going to go into game settings and then we're going to select smooth games and change that to off that's going to turn off by linear filtering and as you can see here with this random game again everything looks nice and crisp and pixelated so in general from a system-wide perspective i recommend turning off smooth games now you can also change things by platform so what you do is you go into the platform you press the select button and then you select advanced system settings and within here you can make all sorts of changes you can change out the emulator you could change your graphics backend to vulkan or you can even change the resolution we're going to set ours to 4x for ps1 games now you can also do this by game what you do is you hold down the a button and then you select advanced game options and here you'll have the same options as the ps1 options but they'll be specific to whatever game you just selected so if you have a certain joystick you want to use or resolution you want to use on a certain game that's how you would adjust it so here's crash bandicoot running at a four times resolution and you can see it's running at 60 frames per second solid so you can also go into retroarch so you hold down select press the a button to get into the quick menu and within here we can change the options on the fly as well so here i've changed the options to 16 resolution and as you can see here it's still running at 60 frames per second and that's one of the cool things about running these emulators directly on a pc is that the pcs are much more powerful than your retro handheld systems or even an android tv box like the super console x and on top of that a lot of the standalone emulators are already integrated into bodicera so in the application section i'm going to pull up the wii u emulator and within here you can make adjustments to your settings as well so if you're familiar with cemu you could go in and you can add your graphics packs and then change the resolution on each of the games as you're going through them so it's kind of the best of both worlds you have that emulation station interface but the powerful back end of the standalone emulators as well now i know i'm just breezing through a lot of this setup stuff and that's because it's very in-depth and it would take me many many videos to put all this together instead what i recommend is go back to the botticera website and check out their wikipedia page within here you can find a systems page and then you can go directly to a lot of these systems and read exactly what is required in terms of file types and then just general setup as well now say you don't like to read written guides and you rather watch videos about it i actually would recommend this other channel here it's called badasseranation and this is a relatively new channel but they do really good in-depth guides that will walk you through how to set up various systems on bottosera and this guy is mostly using windows pcs to do it so it really goes hand in hand with this video here to be honest i used a lot of these videos to set up my own settings because things like 3ds ps3 and xbox are kind of a pain to set up the first time around but this guy makes it really easy so i recommend that you subscribe to this channel and i'll leave a link to it below now a couple other things before we get into gameplay you can also go into the updates and downloads and download a bunch of different themes as well and the badasera themes are really high quality a lot of these are made for high resolution displays so they're going to look really good on your computer monitor or if your computer's hooked up to a tv all these things are going to look really nice so if you do install bottasera onto a flash drive i do recommend that you also go through and install all of these themes as well because there's going to be something on here you're going to like now on top of that you're going to want to scrape all of your artwork and things like that but it's a pretty intuitive process and again if you run into any problems i recommend going to the bottasera wiki page or the badasara nation youtube channel okay so now that i've set everything up on my home pc here let's take that flash drive out and we're going to put it into a different computer so this is my son's computer here it's just a dell optiplex i put a couple extra things inside of it basically i watched some eta prime videos and i just set everything up it's not a powerhouse by any means but let's see what happens when i plug in my flash drive so here i am plugging it in and then i'm pressing f12 on the usb keyboard and here's the boot menu here and obviously it's going to look different depending on the bios of the computer that you use but i'm picking the usb flash drive and it's booting into bodicera and just like that all of my settings everything that i've set up now works on this pc now obviously this pc is not as powerful as the one that i have so i'm going to have to adjust the resolution in certain games but regardless you can see that gamecube games are playing at 1080p right here on my son's computer and that's kind of the power of having this usb flash drive you can put it into any computer and all of a sudden it'll turn it into a standalone gaming system as soon as i showed my son this he started asking for that flash drive because it allows him to access all these games without having to install anything onto his little computer so now the two of us are fighting over who gets to use the flash drive okay so i recorded a ton of gameplay and setting all this up so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to integrate some music here into the background and we're just going to kind of relax and listen to some music and watch me play through a lot of these systems and i'll pop in every once in a while to kind of talk about my experience with each of these but in general i basically maxed the resolution to 1080p on most of these systems and for the most part i also tried to stick with the default emulator that bottasera recommends now like i mentioned before setting up 3ds was kind of a pain so i definitely recommend watching the botticera nation videos about that but these can also be upscaled which i did to 1080p and they still ran at full speed [Music] when it comes to 16-bit systems like super nintendo and genesis i really didn't do much other than keep it on the default settings but everything played just perfectly as expected [Music] when it comes to arcade games for the most part everything played really well it's important you have the matching rom set with the main versions that are available in botocera but other than that some of the very hard to play games like killer instinct and tekken just played fine in that same kind of vein nintendo 64 was perfect i upscaled everything to 1080p and there wasn't a single moment of slowdown [Music] same thing with the nintendo gamecube i upscaled everything to 1080p and even the hardest run games played just fine [Music] now wii games also played well the only issue with these is a lot of them aren't compatible with a regular gamepad but those that are work well [Music] now wii u is one of my favorite systems to emulate there's just a great catalog here and it's very easy to upscale everything to 1080p and still have great [Music] performance [Music] so moving over to sega sega saturn played really well and i kept all these at the native resolution i really like the blocky look of saturn games now when it came to dreamcast i did upscale everything to 1080p and it still played flawlessly even the hardest games like nba2k1 still did really well [Music] okay moving over to psp i kept everything at a four times upscale here but you could definitely max it out higher if you'd like and i found that when you upscale the 4x like this it's hard to remember that this is a handheld system it looks so good even god of war played fine [Music] so ps2 also plays really well one of the things i love about bottasera is that it makes configuring the settings much more intuitive and easier than having to use some of the native emulators and the ps2 emulator is a perfect example this one's kind of a pain to set up the bodicera makes it much easier than the regular interface and these are all upscaled to 1080p as [Music] well [Music] [Music] now there were some games that had issues for example the jack and daxter games for some reason had this weird polygon thing going on and i bet you there's a fix for that in the settings somewhere but at least initially it does look a little weird [Music] now ps3 also works on botocera as you can see here i'm playing call of duty 4. and when you're in the tutorial and in a closed environment everything works really well but when you get into an open environment like this the game lags and again this might be something you could fix in the settings but by default this is something you're gonna have to mess with now some of the easier games to play like psn games they play just fine [Music] and additionally the original xbox can also play on this too and here i am playing some xboxing games at native resolution without making any adjustments to the settings and they're running flawlessly this was really impressive [Music] all right everyone that's it for this video i really wanted to show off this proof of concept here in the fact that you can just take a usb flash drive and with the help of a keyboard as well as a game pad you can be well on your way to turning any pc into a gaming machine now this is by no means a new concept badasera has been around for a while but i don't know it's something about the fact that this little flash drive on its own is a portable system is really appealing to me because i know that if i buy a new computer down the line or if i'm traveling over to a friend's house or if i have like a work computer that i don't want to install anything on this is a perfect solution for that so let me know what you think in the comments below is this something you plan on doing for your computer as well i'd be really interested to hear what other ideas you have for a system like this as always thanks for watching please like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 1,288,654

Keywords:

Id: e0klElI4KLc

Length: 22min 26sec (1346 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/grimfusion]

Nice. I got an external 1TB USB3 SSD. Installed RetroArch on it on my ShieldTV, filled it with ROMs, then plugged it into my PC, portablized a version of RetroArch for Windows, installed that in a separate directory, and pointed it at the same drive directories the Android version of RetroArch uses.

Means I can use the drive from my Shield, unplug it, plug it into any PC with Windows, and can play games my Shield underpreforms on.

Same idea, less platform compatibility and no OS involved.

[u/Shiny_and_ChromeOS]

I'd really like to get this working with my Dell SFF PC that's plugged into the family room TV. It's just weird I've never been able to get the F12 boot interrupt to work reliably.

[u/DotMatrixHead]

I think the idea was partly to show how running a retro library from micro SD could work on the Steam Deck.

I like the idea but if it’s not to go in a portable computer then it’s a quarter of the price for a traditional hard drive, or about half the price for an SSD.

[u/detourne]

So is RGC just going over ETA Prime's old videos and updating them or something?

I appreciate his videos, but this concept isn't exactly new.

[u/InigoMarz]

This looks awesome. The best part is that USB's aren't expensive, and you can fill a lot in one.

[u/Traditional-Leave425]

Hola algien que entienda de batocera y Linux me puede decir que programas utilizaron para hacer la interfaz gráfica de batocera

[u/Cultural_Macaroon455]

Hi there!

I installed Batocera on a USB flash drive. I can boot into it successfully and it looks great, but I have an issue with it.

In my notebook, I have one internal SSD split into two partitions (C:\ system and D:\ anything else) but after pressing F1 the files app see only the system ( C:\) partition and I can't figure out how to mount my "other" (D:\) partition. All my stuff is on the D:\ drive so I can't copy anything into the ROMs folders. Please help me.