Régis Hennequin

Beyond the desk · Passion 03

Retro gaming

Classic consoles and the games that defined them, kept alive on modern hardware: a Batocera box under the TV, and a Retroid Pocket handheld for everywhere else.

On the TV: Batocera on a mini PC

Batocera.linux turns an ordinary mini PC into a dedicated retro console: it boots straight into an EmulationStation-style front end, with no Windows underneath to fight with. The photos below are my own reference build, an HP EliteDesk mini PC with an Intel Core i5-6500 (6th generation), opened up to show what’s inside.

  1. Pick your hardware. Batocera’s own hardware guidance is a useful reality check on what a given CPU (and GPU) tier can drive: light, low-power chips comfortably handle everything up to the 6th/7th-generation consoles (NES through PS1/Saturn/N64-era systems and beyond) at full speed. Step up towards an i5-6500-class desktop chip, ideally paired with even a modest discrete GPU, and PS2, GameCube and Wii emulation becomes realistic too; anything above that tier opens the door further still, into PS3/Wii U territory, at the cost of a bulkier, hotter machine.
  2. Install Batocera. Follow the official installation guide: it covers writing the image to a USB drive or SSD and booting into it on PC hardware.
  3. Add your games, then scrape the library. Copy ROMs onto the machine and let it fetch box art and metadata automatically: see “Keeping the library tidy” further down this page.
  • My HP EliteDesk mini PC, the Batocera box under the TV.
  • Opened up: the cooling fan and the 2.5-inch drive that hold the ROM library.

On the go: Retroid Pocket 5 on ROCKNIX

For handheld play, I run a Retroid Pocket 5 on ROCKNIX, a community-maintained, EmulationStation-based OS built specifically for Android handhelds. It swaps the stock Android interface for the same kind of curated, console-like front end that Batocera gives a mini PC.

  1. Flash ROCKNIX to an SD card. Use ROCKNIX’s device-specific guide for the Retroid Pocket 5, alongside its general installation instructions.
  2. Boot from the card to get the same curated, console-like front end that Batocera gives the mini PC above, in your hand.
  3. Add your games, then scrape the library: the same ScreenScraper step covered below works identically here.
Part of my own retro corner.

Keeping the library tidy: ScreenScraper

A big multi-system ROM collection turns into a wall of grey filenames without some care. ScreenScraper is the community database that both Batocera and ROCKNIX use as a media source: point EmulationStation’s built-in scraper at it and it pulls box art, screenshots, logos, descriptions and other metadata for each game automatically, turning a folder of files into a proper, browsable library.

From a couple of trips

The hobby travels well. A 40th-anniversary Super Mario Bros display, a visit to the Nintendo Museum, and Bowser keeping watch between the banners: a few stops from trips built partly around the games.

  • Super Mario Bros, 40 years.
  • Getting there: the Shinkansen.
  • Super Nintendo World.
  • Bowser, keeping watch.

From playing to building: Altiplume

Pixel art, strict rules and designs that still hold up decades later: that is what retro gaming taught me, and it is the inspiration behind Altiplume, my own cosy 8-bit game. You run an airmail aerodrome in the 1930s, in an invented world of high plateaus, lakes and lanterns.

I built it in under twenty-four hours with an AI coding agent writing the code while I set the rules, tested on my own devices and merged every change. The project is documented in an open technical report with a permanent DOI.

Read the Altiplume story →

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