Turn An Old Cheap PC Into An Emulation Dream Machine!

hey what's going on guys it's cta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to turn an old office pc into an emulation powerhouse using bottom sierra now what i have on the table here are a couple different options that i've actually used over the last few years they work great with emulation and also work great with botocera specifically but one of the big reasons i chose these pcs to show off is the price you can pick one of these units up anywhere from 75 to 150 depending on the configuration on ebay and sometimes you can even find these office pcs for free near you now one of the main requirements that i personally like to recommend when picking up a pc like this is make sure it's at least a third gen intel cpu third gen and up is going to work perfectly fine with bottocera with recent updates i've personally run into issues with second gen and first gen cpus but if you already have one of those systems laying around you can always test this out i mean chances are you can get it up and running but you will get better performance out of third and fourth gen so three of these pcs here actually have 4th gen i5s we have a lenovo an hp and another small lenovo the m92p but my personal new pick is the optiplex 3050. i recently did a video on this mini pc and it performs absolutely amazing with emulation it's powered by a 7th gen i5 it's the 7500t low powered version but even on an older 4th gen i5 you can still do gamecube and wii at full speed with the built-in intel graphics because we're not going to be using any kind of gpu video card or graphics card with any of these just the built-in intel uhd graphics so before we get started here there are a few extra things you're going to need to turn your old pc into an emulation powerhouse so let's go over those right now so i'm going to be using this optiplex 3050 it's got 8 gigs of ram it came with a 128 gigabyte ssd which i'm actually going to be using to install bottosera on and it does ps2 pretty well first thing you're going to want to consider is a controller you can go wireless or wired you can pick up a two pack of these cheaper ps3 clone controllers for about 16 to 18 dollars or you can go with a higher quality usb controller but keep in mind bottosera will work with a ps3 and ps4 controller wirelessly as long as you have bluetooth or a dongle or it'll work wired with an xbox 360 or xbox one controller and you might already have one of those laying around next on the list we're gonna need a separate hard drive to install botocera on you can actually just use a usb drive but i'm gonna opt to use this 128 gigabyte ssd along with this sata to usb adapter this is going to make life so much easier these are fairly cheap on ebay and amazon links for everything i mentioned in this video are in the description basically this turns our drive into a usb drive therefore making it a lot easier to get botocera installed on said drive you can use this with an ssd or a mechanical drive mechanical drives will offer more storage at a lower price next on the list i recommend a separate usb drive and this is how we're going to transfer our games over to the internal drive because once we flash our operating system being botocira to the ssd or hard drive we're not going to be able to read it in windows without a third party application and botocera already has a file manager built in and it actually makes it really easy to transfer games from this usb and finally you will need a keyboard for the initial setup but once we have this all set up you can navigate everything with a controller so the first thing we need to do is get botocera installed to our internal drive and we're going to be doing this from a windows pc but this will also work with mac or linux if you're using a linux pc you do not need this usb drive you can actually plug the drive right in and transfer your games that way but most people who are going to be following this tutorial will be using a windows pc so go ahead and grab your hard drive adapter and usb drive we're going to move over to a separate windows pc to get this installed all right so now that we have our hardware ready to go it's time to install botocera to our ssd or hard drive it really depends on what you chose first thing i did was plug in my ssd using that usb to sata adapter i've renamed it 128 ssd so i know exactly where it is this is what we're going to be installing our operating system to so the very first thing we need to do is download the correct version of botocer for a pc i'll leave a link for this website in the description bottocera.net lots of great information over here they do have a wiki page they have a change log and a forum if you need some help i'm going to choose get bottocera from here there's a lot of options but since we're working with an older pc what we want to do is go with x64 this is for a desktop or a laptop unfortunately they discontinued the 32-bit version but um 64 is going to work with what we need so we're going to download the direct link it's going to start our download and it's 1.8 gigs while this is downloading let's go ahead and download the software we're going to use to get this installed on our hard drive or ssd and that's going to be etcher again link for this is in the description i always download the portable version but this will work with windows mac or linux i'm gonna go with the portable windows version and i'm just gonna wait for everything to finish up downloading and then i'm gonna place it on my desktop for easy access all right so it's finished downloading we have etcher here and the bottosera image that we just downloaded we want to extract this it just makes it easier so i'm going to right click and extract once it's finished extracting we're going to go into that folder and as you can see we now have a bottosera disk image file this is what we're going to be flashing to our ssd hard drive or usb drive we're going to open up etcher from here we're going to choose flash from file this is going to be that image we just extracted mine's on my desktop in that bottosera folder disk image file next we need to select our target which in this case is going to be an ssd but like i mentioned at the beginning of the video you can use a mechanical drive an ssd or a usb drive it's really up to you we're going to choose this and since it's a larger size it's actually going to give me a warning make sure you choose the correct drive that's one of the main reasons i rename this and set it as drive z that way i know exactly where i'm flashing this to select flash like i said it's going to give us a warning because it's a little large it's a 128 drive i'm going to choose yes i'm sure because i'm 100 sure this is the drive i want to flash to and etcher's going to start flashing podcara to that drive for us this is going to take care of everything and there it is botocera is now flashed to our drive we can actually boot this up on our pc but before we move back over there we're going to want to add our own games and for this method we're going to do it all within botocera but when it comes down to it the easiest way that i found to do this is actually transfer your games to a separate usb drive i have some games on my desktop and a folder called games i can't tell you exactly where to get these your best bet would be rip your own but you can always do a quick google search i have some dreamcast gamecube gameboy advance n64 ps1 and snes we do have a file manager inside of botocera and instead of connecting over network i highly recommend transferring these to a usb drive and that way we can transfer them to our internal drive while we have botocera booted up so let me go ahead and grab my usb drive that we're gonna transfer these games to okay so i've plugged in the usb drive i'm gonna transfer my games to it's just a 32 gigabyte drive usb 3.0 link for one of these will be in the description and i'm going to go to my games directory on my pc i'm just going to transfer everything over to this usb drive so we have dreamcast gamecube gameboy advance n64 ps1 and snes give this a little while to transfer over then we're going to move over to the pc we're going to run botocera on okay so let's go ahead and get this up and running i have my controllers i opted to use the wired controller but you can go wireless i would recommend something with a 2.4 gigahertz dongle they're pretty cheap on ebay links to everything will be in the description personally i'm a big fan of this little optiplex 3050 we have our ssd that we install bottocera on and our usb drive that contains our games so now i'm just going to go ahead and install this ssd it's going to be different for each pc but if you're running one of these little optiplexes it's really easy to do most of them will come with a hard drive bracket that's just going to plug right in here another thing that i highly recommend having on hand is a keyboard it can be wired or wireless but uh now that we have this together i'm going to go ahead and plug in all of my peripherals except for that usb drive and boot this up for the first time all right so upon first boot you may need to go into your bios and change a few settings now with this pc here since it's running from an ssd it actually just boots directly up but with other pcs that i've tested this on in the past i've had to go into the bios and change a couple settings now in order to get into your bios it's a bit different for different manufacturers but basically when your pc is booting up there's a certain hotkey you hit on your keyboard be it delete f12 f2 sometimes f7 but with this one here it'll bring you to the boot options by pressing delete while it's booting up and from there i can go into the bios and from within the bios there's actually two settings i always like to change on all the pcs i run this with i go to boot options otherwise known as boot sequence on these dell pcs i change it to legacy boot instead of uefi in my experience i've run into more issues with botocera trying to boot it up in uefi mode so legacy in my opinion is the way to go next thing you can do is change your boot priority or the first boot drive that your pc detects and tries to boot from and i've just set this one to my internal hard drive which is that ssd we flash buttocera to so just to recap i boot this in legacy mode and i always set the drive i have botocera installed as my first boot drive from here we're going to make sure we save and exit so first boot of botocera it's going to extend that partition for us this is working on the ssd we have botocera installed on it should be pretty quick if you're using an ssd and there we have it we're now booting into the operating system bottoser linux so i'll give this a second to boot up and the first boot is always longer than any other ones because it needed to partition that drive for us but now we have it up and running on our pc so first things first we need to set up our controller i'm just going to be using this wired controller just going to plug it right into one of the free usb ports and this is already set up as an xbox 360 controller so it'll work with bottosera right out of the box but if for some reason you're using some kind of off-brand controller that doesn't get detected grab your keyboard and press the spacebar this is going to bring us into the bottosera menu scroll down to controller settings and the very top option is configure a controller we're going to enter this menu our controller is being detected and we're just gonna hold a and from here it's very self-explanatory we're gonna set our controller up up down left right start select a b x y our left analog stick right analog stick our shoulder and trigger buttons l3 r3 and our hotkey which i always set to my select button choose ok and our controller is now mapped but remember some controllers will automatically be mapped i've had really good luck with the ps3 ps4 xbox 360 and xbox one controller already being ready to go with botocera so we're up and running we got our controller working and there are some freeware games that we could actually start playing right now but we definitely want to add our own and they've actually made it really easy to do this because there is a built-in file manager remember that usb stick we transferred our games to we're going to plug it into the pc once it's plugged in we're going to grab our keyboard and press f1 so i've still got the keyboard connected we'll just grab it here on the main menu press f1 and we're gonna enter that file manager what we're gonna do is actually transfer the games from that usb drive over to our hard drive using this file manager so i've just swapped over to my game capture to make it a little easier to see but uh from here we have a share folder and we also have that usb drive remember this is a 32 gigabyte usb drive dreamcast gamecube gameboy advance n64 ps1 snes we're going to go to our share folder and within the share folder you're going to find a folder called roms we also have our bios section now if you're interested in adding bioses for certain systems that require them i recommend heading over to the podocera website they have that wiki they explain everything you need in this video we're just going to focus on getting some games over so we're going to go to our roms folder and in here we have each separate folder for each separate system ps2 ps3 psp psx which is ps1 uh n64 is in here snes we have some main some links and if you haven't guessed by now basically what we're gonna do is head over to our usb drive we're going to grab our game so we'll start with dreamcast i'm just going to copy these move to my roms folder in the share folder find dreamcast and paste them right in here while this is going we can actually head back to our usb drive we'll do gamecube same way i'm just going to copy them roms gamecube paste them in here now if you wanted to go through and just create folders on that usb drive named exactly as they are here you can take that whole usb drive all the contents copy them and transfer them like that but for this video i just did it a little bit differently we'll do one more here n64 from our usb grab my n64 games copy roms n64 paste them these are now transferring from our usb drive to the ssd we have bottocera installed on just be patient and let everything transfer over uh in my experience i found that this is one of the easiest ways to get games over to our hard drive now you can actually do this over network from your pc but if you already have this setup why not utilize the file manager built into this system so all of our games are finished transferring over file close window now we're back at the main emulation station menu our games aren't going to show up just yet and that's because you can do a reboot or you can just press start on your controller game settings update games list i'm going to choose this and there we have it we now have our new sections playstation with the games i transferred over from that usb dreamcast we have some gameboy gamecube uh n64 and super nintendo now if you take a look at this you might notice that the games i just transferred over have no artwork whatsoever so let's go ahead and scrape these there will be a few that already have artwork these were the freeware games that came pre-installed but the stuff that i installed has nothing so we're going to back up press start and you will need to be connected online for this to work you can use wi-fi that's built into your pc personally i prefer just plugging in an ethernet cable if you want to use wi-fi go to your network settings enable wi-fi as long as you have wi-fi on your system enter your ssid here and your wi-fi password but for me what i do is just plug an ethernet cable in and i'm now connected online over ethernet so we'll back up and from the settings menu we're going to find an option called scrape we're going to choose this i choose the gamesdb because we don't need to sign in or anything like that image source screenshot title screenshot 2d box art it's really up to you i'm just going to go with screenshot you can go with the 2d box if you'd like to logo source wheel but there are some options that you can mess around with i'm just going to go with none and my logo source will be wheel we can scrape fan art you can scrape the back side of the box but i'm just going to go with the screenshots so we'll scrape now you can deselect any systems you don't want to scrape but from here i'm just going to choose start and up in the top right hand corner it's going to give us a status on everything being scraped right now this could take a while depending on how many games you have installed i'm just going to let this one finish up and now my box art has been scraped so if i go into in 64 you'll see that the games that i just transferred over from that usb drive now have artwork snes what else did i do here uh some dreamcast and unfortunately it didn't scrape this game and that's because of the naming convention i have that usa at the end if you want to go through and rename this you could re-scrape it it's really up to you but we've got our games installed we've got our box art and we can actually start playing these games right now but there are a few extra settings that i'd like to show you one of the main ones being you might not be getting sound right now out of your hdmi port we can actually head back to the settings press start scroll down until we see system settings and from here our video output is set to auto that's going to be our hdmi or vga depending on what you're using our audio output is also set to auto sometimes these older pcs do have a speaker built into the pc itself and most of the time it will use that speaker but we want audio over hdmi so what we need to do is find the correct channel usually it's hdmi 0 pch this is my intel hdmi output and now i should have sound out of hdmi if you get into a game and you don't have hdmi sound yet you will have to change this channel but most of the time i find that it's hdmi zero changing the look of botocera is actually really easy the stock theme that comes pre-installed is the carbon theme designed for bottocera personally i do like this but there are some other great themes that we can easily download we've already connected our pc online so we can just press start scroll down to updates and downloads themes and it's going to give us a list of the themes and also gives us a quick look over on the right hand side so if you see a theme that you like uh one of my favorites here is epic noir i'm going to download this one install it's going to give us a status up in the top right hand corner so i've got this one installed now press start ui and here's the theme like i said we're using the stock carbon theme but we want to change to that new theme we downloaded which is epic new r in my case we'll just back up and it's automatically going to change that theme for us and the last advanced tip for bottocera that i want to show you is setting up your controller properly for the standalone emulators like gamecube and ps2 there are some others in here so in order to change the settings of the standalone emulators that are included with bottocera we're going to be on the main menu of emulation station here grab your keyboard press f1 we're going to go back to that file manager from here we have a section called applications you can see that these are the standalone emulators that come included we have a few to choose from and running these will depend on how powerful your pc is this pc that i'm using here this mini dell does a great job with psp ps2 ps1 gamecube and wii we're just going to go with the dolphin emulator which is for gamecube and wii we're going to launch the application from here with our mouse we still have our controller plugged in so from the menu up here we're going to go to controller configure this is going to bring up our controller menu we need to choose the correct controller it really depends on what you have plugged in but like we saw mine is detected as an xbox 360 controller you can also hit the refresh button now what we need to do is choose each one of these corresponding buttons and press the button on our controller so for a i'm going to press a on my controller b b on my controller it might show up differently here but it's mapping that button that i pressed x y it's very self-explanatory and you will need to do this in order to set this controller up properly for these standalone emulators we're only mapping for the dolphin emulator right now so you will have to go through for other ones like ps2 duct station and even ps3 if your system is powerful enough to handle it once you're finished mapping your controller choose close and close another quick tip when it comes to gamecube and wii emulation with botocera from within the dolphin emulator which we just mapped our controller we have graphics if your system is powerful enough we can actually upscale this and this one will do 720p i could leave it at opengl or change it to vulcan but it is running the standalone version of dolphin so if you've ever configured it before this should be a breeze for you we'll choose close and we're going to exit this again we only map dolphin so if you want to do it for 3ds duck station ps2 and even ps3 you can with uh pp sspp i found that it usually detects the controller automatically no matter what it is but once we launch a game we can easily get into the menu from there so you won't need to map it here but yeah now you have botocera completely set up on your older pc and i really dig this operating system especially when it comes to these cheaper pcs it does work really well on these intel systems dell lenovo and even hp which can be gotten on ebay for pretty cheap nowadays before we wrap this video up there's one last thing that i'd like to show you we can actually change per emulator and our per system so if we press start we go to game settings all the way down per system advanced configuration so if i want to go to let's say uh dreamcast i can set this up to have a game ratio of whatever i'd like 4x3 16x9 it's really up to you most of the time things are going to be set to auto video mode smooth games you can set this up the way you'd like but one of the main benefits to entering this menu here is changing your emulator so right off the bat with botoxera dreamcast is going to be running with retroarch and flycast we can actually change this to flycast which is the standalone flycast or redream personally i prefer using redream so i'm going to use that and back up and now when i start a dreamcast game instead of using that flycast core in retroarch it's going to be using redream instead so yeah that's pretty much it for turning your old pc into an emulation powerhouse i know this was a bit drawn out but i kind of wanted to cover all the bases i mean after watching this video and reading through the bottosera wiki you should be able to install this on any pc as for all of the parts i used in this video i will leave links in the description some are going to be ebay some are going to be amazon i'll try to find the cheapest stuff but uh if you have any questions definitely let me know in the comments below and remember read through that bottosera wiki join the forum there's lots of great people over there to help but that's it for this one i hope you have this up and running on your pc and like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 189,837

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, retro gaming, how to, batocera pc, cheap emulation build, cheap emulation pc, recalbox pc, retropie pc, optiplex emulation, pc for retro gaming, retro console, emulation pc, cheap emulation pc build, emulation pc build, emulation pc setup, mini pc for retro gaming, cheap emulation machine, low cost gaming pc, batocera x86, retro gaming console, how to install batocera on pc, how to setup batocera, how to install batocera on laptop

Id: KUfHAFyjby0

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021