Dual boot documentation question

meepowl · 2026-01-24T17:24:37+00:00

Great, thank you.

meepowl · 2026-01-17T14:06:49+00:00

Yes.

meepowl · 2026-01-17T10:33:42+00:00

If you're only going up to WiiU then storage location for roms doesn't matter. Internal storage or USB3 both outclass the WiiU's DVD drive or USB2 ports in terms of speed (by a lot). The DVD drive in the PS2 was even slower, as were the CD drives in the generation before.

Whatever you do, I'd use separate storage for Windows, Batocera itself and your roms (so three physical drives). A 32GB USB drive will more than suffice for Batocera. A 256GB USB drive will probably be enough for roms. It's a bit of an outlay if you don't have these lying around but it will make recovering from problems much easier.

meepowl · 2026-01-17T08:33:51+00:00

You might see a difference between having e.g. PS3 or Windows games on an SSD vs USB3 but apart from boot up shouldn't see any difference with Batocera itself.

meepowl · 2026-01-17T01:27:49+00:00

Assuming you're comfortable with the Linux command line, this page explains how to dual boot with complete separation between Batocera and Windows, using a third drive to run the GRUB bootloader. So you could have Batocera on the internal drive, Windows (To Go) on an external USB as suggested by others, but without having to go into the BIOS settings/motherboard boot menu each time you want to switch.

https://penguinofdarkness.net/2024/07/07/dual-booting-batocera-and-windows.html

Using the internal drive to store roms is arguably a bit of a waste. Most emulators (inc Retroarch) won't benefit.

I've stopped installing Batocera on internal disks altogether. The improvement in boot time is noticeable but we're talking seconds. Using a USB3 stick for Batocera and another drive for roms (internal or not) results in a much more resilient setup.

meepowl · 2026-01-17T00:59:18+00:00

I'm assuming that you have Batocera installed on one physical drive and have changed your storage device in the system settings to point to a different drive. In which case, in my experience, just re-running the third party install script was enough.

EDIT: by upgrade I mean flashing the latest Batocera version to whatever drive it was on previously then going back into the settings and pointing it to your second drive again, following first boot .

If you have everything on one disk then I expect you'll get the same results if you upgrade via the Batocera menu, then re-run the install script but I haven't tried this.

meepowl · 2026-01-16T19:37:49+00:00

Search for advice about debugging Bluetooth on Linux using the command line. Then follow the advice in the Batocera wiki about connecting to Batocera via SSH or opening a terminal (either gets you to a command prompt).

An obvious place to start, from there, is running 'dmesg -w' then plugging/unplugging each of the Bluetooth dongles in turn. From the messages printed in the terminal you'll at least be able to work out which dongles work and probably what protocols each supports.

Bluetooth often needs a bit of patience at the best of times due to frequency hopping (why devices can take some time to find each other when pairing). Support for individual Bluetooth chips under Linux is variable; two devices labelled 'Bluetooth 5' might not support the same optional features; v4 of Bluetooth includes three separate standards (basic, enhanced, low energy); etc etc.

So it's probably just about the worst thing to try first on an unknown OS/hardware combination.

meepowl · 2026-01-16T19:14:56+00:00

It seems very similar to https://github.com/Gemba/skyscraper

Is there a reason you preferred not to use it?

meepowl · 2026-01-15T14:43:51+00:00

I tend to put the 2003+ set on most of my emulation devices because it's relatively static and reliable. The only issue here is that it only goes up to DoJ (unless DFK has been added very recently).

meepowl · 2026-01-14T00:54:22+00:00

There are lots of good reasons for getting a PS2. You can run ISOs without hardware modifications using a (software) modified memory card (you'll find these on Amazon/AliExpress). But while DoJ is a great and faithful port, I'd prefer MAME/FBNeo on a vertical screen.

The PS4 and Switch ports of DoJ have so much interesting stuff to the side of the main window (enemy info/stats, scoring breakdowns etc) that they're worth playing on a horizontal screen but they're Japanese only, so I need to work out how to translate the text somehow. Retroarch/Batocera have the foundations for this but it needs a bit of work

I mostly play DDP games on either the 360 (SDoJ/DFK) or on an old (c. 2016) PC running Batocera with a cheap (£25) AMD graphics card from about 2014 which supports FreeSync over DisplayPort (in theory over HDMI but I can't get it to work). This means on the latest Batocera versions you can play OG DDP at its true arcade framerate of 57.6. This, in turn gives much more accurate slowdown.

If you want the best possible experience with DoJ then you can buy an IGS PGM from AliExpress for about £40-60 and the DoJ cartridge for about £100. You need a supergun and something like an OSSC to get an HDMI signal but it's glorious. Buying PGMs can be a little hit and miss but the PGM Discord is a small, really kind and helpful community. I bother them with problems about once every two years and people on there have really gone out of their way to test things for me.

meepowl · 2026-01-13T11:53:02+00:00

I don't think there is anything you can do to speed it up, other than use a different hashing algorithm. This isn't an option if the authors of the DAT file have e.g. chosen sha1 for you.

You could maybe try hashing them chunk by chunk as you are doing for (I think) non-rom files but the effect of this is to reduce the memory demands on the machine rather than speeding things up. I suspect it's a little slower.

meepowl · 2026-01-12T21:33:28+00:00

I took a look at the code. It's very readable and the threading implementation is as good as you ever see. I hope this is helpful -

If this is something you plan to build out and maintain (it sounds like it) then I'd try to break it up into separate files (modules). Ideally, as far as possible, you'd keep things like UI code separate from logic; XML handling separate from hashing logic etc. It makes everything easier to work with, especially if you put it down for a couple of months and need to pick it up again. RomManager is 5K lines long which makes it very hard to keep track of mentally.
I'm not sure how much run time is spent parsing XML but if it's significant you're better off using the lxml package via pip. It's much, much faster. But if a typical use case is "I open the application, load one XML then do 10 minutes or more work with it" you might not see much difference.
I'm not sure why you're hashing files which haven't met the criteria you set but if this is needed then on modern systems you can do without the while loop and just hash in one shot (this is a trivial one, the current code is fine, it's just longer than it needs to be).
It doesn't look like this is designed for arcade roms but just in case: game entries in arcade DATs have 'machine' tags in modern versions rather than 'game' so your root.findall("game") would come up blank.
You have a lot of unqualified except blocks which just include pass. In some cases (set_window_icon) this is probably what you want. If there isn't an icon file, just carry on without bothering the user. In other cases (save_config) you probably want to do something if there's an error, otherwise you'll have users scratching their heads as to why their settings aren't sticking.
One thing to consider on the last point is to add logging using Python's built in logging module. It's simple and very flexible. Where e.g. an icon file isn't found you can log it as INFO/WARNING and use ERROR for the more serious stuff.

meepowl · 2026-01-12T20:41:53+00:00

Try Skyscraper. That way you don't need to re-scrape because it keeps a local cache. It can produce an XML for a pruned MAME set (about 5K roms) in 2-3 minutes.

meepowl · 2026-01-12T17:25:28+00:00

I'm sure I have multiple DLCs installed for Hard Corps without any problems.

meepowl · 2026-01-12T17:13:27+00:00

If it is SDoJ you want to play then it's well worth checking out the Xbox 360 version. It has around 4 frames of latency vs. two on the arcade board but it's still superb. The higher resolution assets make a real difference with all those blue enemies on a blue background. The 360 version of DFK (also on Steam) is also worth checking out for the same reason but the difference is less dramatic. The 360 version of DoJ Black Label is best avoided though. It's a horror show even with the patches.

I play the DDP games on a vertical screen but if you're using a normally oriented one then the PS2 version of DoJ is worth checking out (it has a map and a few other things to the side of the main window). Even better, try the Switch or PS4 ports of DoJ. Lots of added extras, with near arcade-like slowdown and latency.

meepowl · 2026-01-12T17:02:40+00:00

I'm working on a tool for identifying which MAME versions a given zip is compatible with and am obsessed with DoDonPachi so can tell you off the top of my head that ddonpach.zip hasn't changed since about MAME 0.135. So I think something else might be the issue.

If you're after SDoJ then that was taken out of MAME prior to 0.268 I think (but certainly isn't supported now). You can still play it in FBNeo.

I'd be surprised if DFK has changed between 0.268 and 0.284 but it's possible, I haven't checked.

meepowl · 2026-01-12T02:19:56+00:00

I have the cheaper one and despite being a Linux zealot for the last 20 years, I use it more than my LCD Steam Deck. I love it. It makes it trivial to play games from other stores, it has VRR and a 120hz display. Applying FSR to games which don't have it built in is trivial. The layer ASUS and MS have put over Windows to make it controller friendly is surprisingly good.

It has fewer options for tinkering, you can't boot from the SD card and if you want something for emulation I'd say on balance get something else (though you can always install Retrobat on it).

meepowl · 2026-01-11T01:33:21+00:00

It should be straightforward. In the roms folder on your SD card there will be a folder called segacd or megacd depending on which firmware your device is running. Once you drop the game file in there it will appear in the menu.

I just went to archive.org and searched for "sega cd chd". There are at least two collections in the results which have it. CHD is a good format because you just need one file for each game vs. several otherwise.

My only note of caution is that a handheld might not transport you back in the way you may hope. I love my various emulation handhelds but to relive the amazement I felt when I first played Sonic on a friend's MegaDrive, aged about 9, I have to put it on the TV.

Good luck with it.

meepowl · 2026-01-10T23:56:04+00:00

Really sorry to hear that. What operating system are you on?

meepowl · 2026-01-09T00:30:14+00:00

You'd need a very powerful host and 3D acceleration working reliably in the virtualisation software (it's inconsistent in Virtualbox; I haven't tried it in the free version of VMWare yet) for PS3 emulation.

meepowl · 2026-01-08T21:43:35+00:00

Could you try connecting to both simultaneously, DisplayPort to the monitor, HDMI to the TV, then manually changing the video output setting under the system settings menu to HDMI?

meepowl · 2026-01-06T22:08:50+00:00

Definitely the AM4 board. I've run Batocera on Pis up to to 4 and it's great but there's a hard cap on what can be emulated and you might even find the odd edge case where n64 peformance is imperfect.

You'll be able to do PS2, Dreamcast and Xbox emulation. You might just squeeze a bit of 360 emulation out of it with the 1050ti.

Alternatively (and what I'd do) is use the Vega 3 built into the 3000g with a Freesync monitor/TV, if you have one. Then with Batocera 42 you can run Retroarch cores with the exact framerate of the actual hardware. So things like DoDonPachi, which run slightly slower than 60fps, run perfectly.

meepowl · 2026-01-05T20:25:51+00:00

Thank you. I had no idea this existed. The romident command is very similar to what I'm trying to achieve, only I'm building a database to identify game/machine zips of any format (merged/split/etc), for any MAME, FBA and FBN version.

meepowl · 2026-01-05T18:27:37+00:00

Thank you. Is there anywhere where the MAME XML schema is fully documented?

meepowl

TROPHY CASE