r/batocera

My buddy told me he wants a device he can play N64 (mostly Mario Kart 64) on his big living room TV. His wife won't allow any consoles or cables to be visible. That's a little draconian in my opinion, but none of my business and it presents an interesting challenge. He has an N64, but it can't be hidden, and I don't want to make him get an upscaler. He has a Switch, but I've read the Nintendo Switch Online N64 experience is not very good. I'd like to build him a turnkey-ready Batocera console as a gift and see if I can meet the following goals:

• small enough to mount behind the TV panel and hide any cords

• powerful enough to run N64 (and earlier gen Nintendo consoles) smoothly without any distracting flaws or lag

• accept up to 4 wireless gamepads, also without any distracting lag

• be plug-and-play ready, requiring virtually zero config or tech support after I set it up for him

• Run around $100 for everything but the gamepad(s)

So far, I've put together a Raspberry Pi 5 (2GB) console with a spare 32GB Micro SD card I had lying around and paired an 8BitDo bluetooth N64 gamepad to it. It seems to work pretty reliably but sometimes the gamepad has brief connectivity problems and some N64 titles show graphical glitches that might be distracting (e.g. shadows in Mario 64). Even with a very nice case and Canakit power adapter it all came in under $100.

I've also ordered a small HP Elitebook 705 G4 mini pc on eBay for cheap that I'll try, too. It was $100 before tax and should be a little more powerful, but I'm concerned about it only having DP output ports and losing audio when converting to HDMI.

What do you think? Does anyone have any ideas? Is it completely unrealistic?

Im having issues with my emulator and I think ive hit the wall, im trying to play original xbox games but I keep getting a full system crash sometimes straight away and sometimes 5 mins in, im running a i7 4790k, 1660ti and 16gb vengeance ram. Ive tried a new psu, cpu cooler and adjusted the voltage on bois but its still the same. Anyone got any other suggestions before I throw it in the bin, as of today I have tried one stick of ram and other fresh ones I had sitting witj a cmos clear and had the same results

This is a simple build needing only a screw driver. The 9u has room for a drawer that I can put things like a keyboard/touch pad remote and an Xbox controller. Going down to a 4u is an option that would mean not having the drawer and the mini pc would sit on top but would be about half the hight

A few days ago I shared SudoBat, a free app that runs inside Batocera (x86_64) and does per-game, hardware-aware graphics tuning. Today's release is a big one https://www.reddit.com/r/batocera/comments/1umgrtb/i_built_a_tool_that_diagnoses_emulator_crashes/ — if you tried it, it's worth re-installing (one command, bottom of the post).

Major updates

Auto-tuning driven by you, not just crash fixing. After any real game session, SudoBat asks a few targeted questions: did it run smooth? good FPS? stutter in intense scenes? glitches?

- Everything fine → your current settings get validated into the catalog (next time the game is already known-good, and you can opt-in to share them with everyone)

- "It stuttered" → it proposes a lighter graphics set, one button to apply, replay, repeat until it's right

This is the real core of the tool now: your judgment of real sessions drives the tuning, for every game on every emulator.

It distinguishes a crash from a bad experience. Died in seconds, or a known fatal in the emulator log → straight to diagnosis, no silly questions. Played 20 minutes and exited normally → it asks how it went. And for the case no machine can see — the game that dies on its own after 20 minutes, which in the numbers looks identical to you quitting — there's a first question: "did it close on its own?". If yes, it re-reads the emulator logs as a crash and can fire the optional AI turbo on it.

It tells you about updates itself. Once a day (3-second timeout, totally silent if offline) it checks whether a new release is out; if so, a discreet banner appears and you can update from Settings with one button — it just runs the official installer, selftest included. Never automatic, always behind your confirmation. So this is the last update you'll have to find out about from Reddit.

Fixes (all found on real sessions)

- Add-on emulators now get real graphics sets. Emulators installed by add-on packs register their options in separate es_features_*.cfg files that weren't being read. Fixed generically for any add-on, present or future. On my box this unlocked the whole Switch family, which previously showed "no settings for this game".

- Game identification is much more reliable. The game ID is now read straight from the emulator's own log (which always declares it, even for a 30-second session), with the folder heuristic as fallback — and the scan covers the standard XDG paths too, where AppImage emulators outside Batocera's config redirection actually write.

- Controller buttons are read from YOUR pad, not assumed. The old hardcoded "Xbox-style" mapping got SELECT wrong on a real X360 pad (so the AI turbo was unreachable from the gamepad). Now SudoBat reads the exact mapping you already configured in EmulationStation (es_input.cfg, matched by controller GUID). If ES doesn't know your pad — or knows it only partially — a 3-press wizard asks for the buttons at first start, and you can remap anytime from Settings.

How to update / install

Same one-liner for both — re-running it updates:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/masimoneext-sketch/SudoBat/master/install.sh | bash

Your data survives updates: outcomes history, catalog and your Groq API key (if you use the optional AI turbo) are all preserved. And from this version onward, SudoBat will notify you of the next release by itself.

Honest notes, as always

- No FPS measuring — your end-of-session judgment IS the quality signal, and that's deliberate

- It still can't switch emulator/core for you (EmulationStation owns that); it tells you when and how

- The community catalog starts empty and grows from validated real sessions — the first field-validated entry landed today

Repo (readable code, 29 selftests, PolyForm Noncommercial): https://github.com/masimoneext-sketch/SudoBat

Feedback and weird hardware reports very welcome — the whole point is that it reads YOUR machine instead of assuming mine.

Over the past year I've been using coding agents (mostly Claude Code) to help setup, maintain, and customize my cabinet. Which is how I learned coding agents lack knowledge about Batocera...

So we packaged our learnings up as batocera-skills: a free, MIT-licensed collection of Agent Skills (the AGENTS.md/SKILL.md format) that teaches an agent how to actually operate a Batocera box.

Repo: https://github.com/t3chnaztea/batocera-skills

There are five skills, each covering one area:

• batocera-ops: the foundation. The read-only filesystem model, config and log paths, a safety doctrine, and a remote verify loop
• batocera-roms: why a game won't show up, hide-don't-delete curation, multi-disc cleanup, dump verification against No-Intro/Redump
• batocera-display: setting shaders and bezel artwork
• batocera-tuning: laggy frontend diagnosis, the governor-stuck-in-powersave bug, overclock scoping, input latency
• batocera-maintenance: backups over SSH, surviving version upgrades

It's all original prose from actually running a cabinet (v41 through v43, x86_64), not a scrape of the wiki. The wiki stays the canonical manual; this covers the stuff the wiki doesn't tell you.

If you use Claude Code, it installs as a plugin in two commands:

/plugin marketplace add t3chnaztea/batocera-skills
/plugin install batocera@t3chnaztea

But the skills are plain Markdown with standard Agent Skills frontmatter, so they work with any harness that reads SKILL.md files. You can also just clone the repo and copy the folders in.

Fair warning before you install: these skills direct an agent to SSH into your cabinet as root. Read the skills first (they're just Markdown), and please change Batocera's default root/linux password if you haven't. Everything is designed non-destructive-first (hide don't delete, back up before edit, dry-run flags on anything that can remove files), but it's your cabinet and your risk.

If you've got your own hard-won Batocera lessons, there's a contribution template in the repo. PRs welcome.

Not affiliated with the Batocera project, just a fan.

After months of grinding, two steps forward and sometimes two steps back...Finally nailed GPU hardware acceleration on the Radxa Cubie A7S on a custom Batocera fork using GLES2. I forgot to update the wifi firmware to work on 6.6 kernel so that's happening right now. I haven't had an opportunity to test audio either, just running through a USB-C to DP connection.

This is nowhere from being done. But I needed to share this, it was a long time coming! If anyone would like to give it a look you can find the GitHub here: https://github.com/GameOctane/OctaneOS

Got these on eBay recently. Needed a cheaper option that worked better than the RPi 4 or 5. I'm really impressed with these. I got the big one for $30 shipped and the "tiny" for $50 shipped. Both came with RAM just no drives. I have a mini pc running a 6tb external hdd with Batocera v42 on there. Used it to test these things out today. Both worked really well. Only consoles that wouldn't work were the 3DS and Wii. Which frankly, I don't need on most projects. And with drive prices what they are I definitely don't need to be springing for a 6tb drive every project either. The "tiny" is a great size but I also don't mind using the big one if it's going in a vertical cab anyway. Very nice options to have, so much so that I think I may buy a few of each over the next few months just to have.

I've been running Batocera on a small box for a while and got tired of the same loop: a game crashes or stutters, I go dig through logs, tweak batocera.conf by hand, test, repeat. So I built a tool to do that part for me and figured someone else here might find it useful.

What it does:

- Detects when a game crashed or ran badly (short session + emulator log signals)

- Reads your actual hardware and es_features to figure out sane graphics settings for THAT game on THAT box — no hand-made presets

- Writes only to batocera.conf, surgically, line by line, with timestamped backups and a one-click restore from the UI (dry-run by default)

- Learns from your feedback: 4 quick flags at the end of a session (smooth / fps ok / stutters in action / glitches) re-rank the suggestions over time

It never swaps your cores or emulators behind your back — the escalation is just lighter settings first, and it tells you what it's doing.

There's an optional Groq turbo mode for unknown crashes (off by default, your own API key), and an opt-in community knowledge base: if a setting works for you, you can share it so others with the same game+hardware get a validated starting point. Opt-in, one tap, nothing leaves your box unless you say so.

Install (Batocera, one line):

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/masimoneext-sketch/SudoBat/master/install.sh | bash

Repo + docs: https://github.com/masimoneext-sketch/SudoBat

It's free for personal use. It's a hobby project, so it's early — I'd genuinely like feedback, bug reports, and which games/systems you'd want covered next. Tested mostly on an iGPU box so far; curious how it behaves on stronger hardware.

Hello everyone i ask for your support about the upgrades i can do to my Optiplex 7010 Plus.

I have 4 storages as you can see, one with W11, one with Debian, one with batocera and the last one to put media files.

I want a GPU that doesnt require additional power and also that works well with Batocera, also maybe a processor upgrade?

any suggestions are apreciatted.

I have a Attack on Mars Arcade 1up cabinet that I'm converting over to use vpinball tables through Batocera. I'm using the Intecgaming Switch electronics for the conversion. How do I get the tables to fill the entire 24 inch screen? I have it set to the maximum resolution, and I've tried some of the lower ones, but they all come out miniaturized like the two in the pictures. I have a couple of tables, like 24, where the bottom of the table is off the bottom edge of the screen. What settings do I need to change to center and expand the tables?