How to use Raspberry Pi Zero W with Batocera linux as your Gamebox

[mylamour]

I found a Pi that my friends send me few years ago. i used to make it as a face recognization tool. so i wonder why do not make it funny again. and i like to make it to be a game box.

Here is what i have :

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Mac Laptop with external displays
• Mini HDMI to HDMI
• A Simple Game Controller
• Card Reader
• SD Card

There is so easy to build a game box with batocera linux.

Install Batocera Linux

Download the image and flash to the SD Card, you can download other version for your own Pi in https://batocera.org/download

wget https://mirrors.o2switch.fr/batocera/bcm2835/stable/last/batocera-bcm2835-36-20230310.img.gz
gunzip -k batocera-bcm2835-36-20230310.img.gz

Now list the SD Card path and flash to it

diskutil list   # you will see the disk path , please change it in next command
sudo dd bs=4m if= batocera-bcm2835-36-20230310.img of=/dev/diskXXXXX  conv=sync

if the disk resources was busy, you can use this command to unmount it.

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskXXXX

When the flash is finished, put the SD Card to Pi Zero , and start the system, if your system was restarted all time. please check the image was right or not. and make sure your power adapter is workable, most time it caused by the lower power.

Install Game

When the system was started, you can select the game to play, but if you want to run some other games, you need put the rom to the SD Card. and due to Mac not support exfats well, i use scp and wget to implement it. in this case, i found a wired issues, once time when i finished the scp, the file will lose the size. for example , i send a 800MB file to the sd card. and scp works fine in the progress, but at the last byte, it will change to 100Mb or less than it. it make me confused. and finally , i use wget to do that.

• In my laptop , roms folder, i start a simple http server with python python3 -m http.server
• In pi( you need ssh into it at first), i use wget http://mymac.ip:8000/roms file

i download few MAME roms to /userdata/roms/mame/ ( ps:// if you have windows laptop, just plug the sdcard into computer, and put roms to your folder in /media/SHARE/roms/mame/)

in the roms folder, you can find lots of sub folder, just put each roms in the right folder. if you want play psp game , then put it into psps, if you want play nse, just put it in the same way.

In the end, I played the game I loved in middle school. At that time, I often went to the game hall after school and played these games. It need money and was forbidden by families. now i have little time , i have the game, but i do not have the fun in this game anymore.