batocera-ES-onArch

Batocera Emulationstation for ArchLinux

Welcome to the homepage of my project ‘Batocera Emulationstation for ArchLinux’.

This package is one piece of a bigger effort to get a console-like gaming PC. But it can also be used independently. My final goal is to use it as a main UI for a controller-based couch gaming PC which will only need keyboard/mouse in very rare edge cases. Thus, most of the basic OS settings should be handled without having to go to the console or another (regular) desktop environment.
However, i don’t want to lose the capabilities a full-blown desktop pc has in terms of software availability and configurability. As such, my idea and plan is to use a plain installation of Arch Linux and provide/install a set of packages and configurations to customize it. I’m still trying to come up with a less verbose and more striking name for the overall project that won’t collide with any trademarks.

The goal of this specific package is to ‘rip out’ batocera-emulationstation of the heavily customized, none-default operating system structure that is batocera.linux and make it run under a regular linux user, all with configuration and save data saved for each user individually.
Something like this has been done before for Windows, see RetroBat for details. However, aside from basing my work on batocera-emulationstation i’m not affiliated in any way with Batocera nor RetroBat.
The main advantage of my approach is the access to much more drivers, kernel modules and utilities, achieved by tapping into a large and well maintained mainstream linux distribution.

More packages will follow in the future which add deeper integration into the OS, the possibility of shared game libraries and basic access right management.

For now, you can check out more details about the rationale, my reasons and motivation in the repository’s README.

Why this effort, aren't there other variants and forks of emulationstation or stuff like Lakka?
I thought about this and evaluated ES-DE (version 3.0.3):
It is a great piece of software in and of itself, but it lacks the external hooks and configuration capabilities i need for a deeper integration with the OS at the end.
Moreover, i think batocera-emulationstation's support for custom systems, custom collections and system grouping is much better.
And its media file management is less hardcoded, but depending on gamelist.xml data which makes it more suitable to a shared-library setup.

* Lakka is too similar to batocera for my taste. Its UI is also based on RetroArch, which i personally don't like.

This page will contain manuals, developer documentation (maybe test + coverage results) and installation instructions in the future.

There will be one sub-section for each release and the master branch.

Quickstart

Installation

git clone https://github.com/GB609/batocera-ES-onArch.git
cd batocera-es-on-arch
git checkout tags/LATEST
makepkg -i -s --needed --asdeps

Adding games

Copy/move files to ~/ROMs/<system> as you would do for batocera.
Note: There is no SHARE or /userdata!

Starting

Run

emulationstation

Configuration

It depends on what shall be configured:

  1. Global keys ([G]), not directly related to systems/emulators. There is only partial support for this at the moment.
    Only those keys which also serve as global defaults for system-based configuration are supported and only when launching games.
    Properties that control OS behavior or integration are not yet supported.
  2. Settings for systems ([S]), either default or specific to games

Configuration files and locations:

  1. [S] Use the emulationstation UI - user specific properties for roms/systems/emulators are written to $ES_CONFIG_HOME/es_settings.cfg by emulationstation.
    Default for ES_CONFIG_HOME is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emulationstation
    This allows to configure everything defined in any system-wide or user-specific es_features.cfg file.
  2. [G][S] Edit files directly located in /etc/batocera-emulationstation/conf.d
    Note: This is not a permanent solution. These files are auto-generated and will be recreated on the next pacman update
    or whenever btc-config generateGlobalConfig is used.
  3. [G][S] Place a custom drop-in file one of the subdirectories of /etc/batocera-emulationstation/conf.d/,
    followed by the command sudo /opt/batocera-emulationstation/btc-config generateGlobalConfig
    This is useful to change global defaults and add custom systems for all users.
  4. [S] Place a file named folder.conf in one of the ~ROMs/system/ root directories.
    Can change any property, but these files will only be read when emulatorlauncher starts a game, so placing OS-related global properties will not have any effect.

Subchapters

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