Batocera has been one of the longest running retro gaming focused operating systems we’ve seen, and RH has been happy to cover them so many times in many different formats along the way. And the keyword is all the formats available. The team at Batocera has covered everything from old PC’s to new handhelds, and even some interesting SBC’s along the way. And with the upcoming release of Batocera 44, it shows that they don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Thanks to Baldly Rudy, over on Twitter, it was brought to our attention just how much was changed with new hardware support for a bunch of our favorite handhelds including the RG 40XX V2 Panel, and RG Vita Pro. But of course there’s a ton more.
If you want to get the full details on what was changed, I highly recommend checking out Batocera’s website, or in this case the changelog on their Github. But if you want to see what’s really dropped recently, you can find the whole run down provided below. With some of the most interesting things highlighted in bold for you.
“Special Notes” from the Batocera Team:
- ShadPS4 has moved from the no longer maintained ShadPS4 Plus to standard ShadPS4
- The Play! emulator (and Libretro variant) has been removed in favor of PCSX2x6 for Namco2x6 systems as well as removed as a PS2 emulator.
Hardware Updates
- Anbernic RG-DS initial support
- Anbernic RG-SP initial support
- Anbernic RG Vita Pro initial support
- Anbernic RG40xx-H-v2-panel variant support
- Anbernic RG40xx-V-v2-panel variant support
- AYN Odin initial support
- AYN Odin 3 initial support
- Mangmi Air X initial support
- Odroid M2 initial support
- Radxa Rock-5T initial support
- Retroid Pocket Nova initial support
Added
- Anbernic H700 device hardware acceleration support
- Anbernic RGCubeXX device LED controller support
- Drastic back for Aarch64 devices
- NanoBoyAdvance as an alternative GBA emulator
- ES Setting for toggle fast forward
- Dolphin GameCube Controller type BattlerGC Pro (x-input mode with analog+digital triggers)
- ES setting to determnine mitigations On|Off(Default On)
- ES setting to choose controller LED mode (Rainbow, Pulse Chroma)
- ES can now display Unicode for ID3 tags of songs played
- Box64 userland x86_64 emulator for aarch64
- Legion Go / Go 2 LED controller support
- Libretro-Azahar
- PCSX2x6 emulator for Namco2x6 systems (see the _info.txt file for rom details)
- Xenia-Edge for x864_64 and select aarch64 devices
Fixed
- BCC menu not showing on SM8250 devices (i.e. Retroid Pocket 5)
- Cannonball coin is now the Select button
- Cannonball fullscreen on Wayland
- Commander Genius fullscreen in Wayland
- Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 initial start to work fullscreen in certain conditions
- Libretro-Hatarib not starting due to a compiled symbol issue
- Mupen64 not starting fullscreen with Wayland
- Pygame fullscreen with Wayland
- Raze analog controls and improved controller bindings
- Simcoupe not starting fullscreen
- Sonic Mania controllers
- Taradino blank screen with Wayland
- Vice not going fullscreen with C128
- X16emu fullscreen with Wayland
Improved
- AYN Thor, AYN button now opens Batocera Control Center
- BigPEmu added to capable aarch64 devices
- Boot logo and video now scales better to the primary screen being rendered on
- Cemu added to capable aarch64 devices
- New CPU, GPU & Battery temp helper script – batocera-temp
- Raspberry Pi4 now uses LabWC
- Raspberry Pi4 now uses the latest Mesa3D drivers
- Khadas VIM4 now uses LabWC
- MangoHud now scales the size based on the screen resolution
- Migrated Khadas VIM4 GPU driver to Panfrost with the latest Mesa3D stack
- PCSX2 variant for capable aarch64 devices
- Removed Libretro-Puae2021
- Removed the buggy Libretro-A5200 core. We will use the compatible Libretro-Atari800 core instead
- Rockchip RK3588 devices moved to the mainline linux kernel: CoolPi 4B, FriendlyElec CM3588 NAS, IndieDroid Nova, Khadas Edge2, Orange Pi 5 Orange Pi 5 Plus, Orange Pi 5B, QuartzPro64, ROCK 5A, ROCK 5B, ROCK 5B Plus, ROCK 5C
- Select Qualcomm handheld devices can now install batcoera on the internal drive alongside Android (batocera-install-internal)
- The Force Engine to capable aarch64 devices
- TR1X & TR2X have merged into the unified TRX which also now supports Tomb Raider 3 As a result your roms in the traider1 & traider2 folders should be moved to the new combined traider folder Ensure you read the info text file in the traider folder
- Vita3k added for capable aarch64 devices
- PCEngine / PCEngineCD: added Libretro-Beetle-PCE (not “Fast”) for capable aarch64 devices
Alongside this came dozens of software updates for emulators, and kernel updates for devices, but those are specific things I’d really recommend checking out the teams changelog for. As always, it’s awesome to see the continued support and update for not just all of these handhelds but for Batocera itself. I can only hope to see these changes continue to drop and to continue their improvement for these systems as a whole. But for now, we just have to wait and see what fully drops with the official release of Batocera 44.
