Portable Retro Arcade on a USB

Portable Retro Arcade on a USB

Do you ever want go back in time and walk the world as your younger self? Remember the days when you would go to the mall and spend hours in the arcade room. Good times….simple times….not having to worry about bills times. Well today we are going to show you how to turn your laptop into a retro arcade so you can feel like the younger you.

We will be showing you how to setup an operating gaming system called Batocera. Batocera is a Linux based open source operating system. There are 3 things you need in order to set up this operating system onto a laptop, 1 is a flash drive, 2 is an internet connection and 3 Software to convert ISO image. The first thing we need to do is head over to Batocera and under downloads we can grab the software from “Desktop, Laptop, NUC and Intel based Apple Computers”. From the downloads section you can clearly see that there are other devices that Batocera can run on. In order to make the flash drive bootable we will need software to convert it into an ISO image. There is 2 software we can use, one is Rufus and the other is BalenaEtcher although we will be using BalenaEtcher. Next with BalenaEtcher we will flash from file and choose the Batocera file we’ve downloaded. Then we will select the flash drive for the Batocera to flashed on and select the Flash option to begin the process. Now you can plug your flash drive into a laptop and it will boot from the flash drive with the Batocera Operating system.

Once you have booted up your Batocera system you’ll notice a wide variety of emulators each containing one game each. In order to play games we will need ROMS of these games which with a quick google search of Legally Obtainable ROMS will yield sites for you. You can insert the Flash Drive with the legally obtained ROMS and press F1 to access the file systems. You can then copy the downloaded ROMS into the ROMS folder under the correct emulator folders for those games. You will need to close the window and restart your machine for the copied files to be seen.

We at TechSceneZA hope the nostalgic experience brings back fun memories and good times from your kid days. We also hope that the gamers that see our small guide have endless fun in a more neat all rounded emulator setup that is trustworthy with fewer bugs and glitches.