**Getting Started with Retro Arcades and Mini PCs**

If you're looking to create a retro arcade experience at home, one option is to use a mini PC as your gaming console. In this guide, we'll show you how to set up a mini PC for retro gaming using the RetroArch emulator and some simple steps to get started.

**Setting Up Your Mini PC**

To start, connect your mini PC to your TV or monitor via HDMI. Once connected, turn on your PC and navigate to the RetroArch menu. From here, select "System Settings" and then "System Selection." This will allow you to choose which systems you want to emulate. In this example, we'll be focusing on the Sega Dreamcast.

**Scraping Games from GamesDB**

To add games to our collection, we'll use the GamesDB database. First, navigate to the GamesDB website and select "Scraper" to start scraping games from your system. Make sure all your systems are selected, except for the Dreamcast, which is the only one we're interested in. Press "Start" on your controller to begin the scraping process.

**Setting Up Box Art**

After scraping, you'll need to add box art to your collection. Go back to the RetroArch menu and press "Start" again. Select "Game Settings" and then "Update Games List." This will update the list of games available for the Dreamcast. You should see Marvel vs. Capcom 2 listed, which was missing from our collection.

**Customizing Your Mini PC**

To customize your mini PC, navigate to the "UI Settings" menu. From here, you can change the theme of your interface. We'll be using the "Es Theme Forever," which has a more video-friendly layout. You can also download and install additional themes by pressing "Start" and then selecting "Updates and Downloads."

**Playing Games with Your Mini PC**

To play games on our mini PC, navigate to the "System Settings" menu and select "Audio Output." Choose HDMI 0 to enable audio output over HDMI. This is the most reliable option for this particular machine.

We'll start by playing some PSP games. First up is Chains of Olympus, which runs smoothly at 2x resolution. This is due to the ease of running on this mini PC. For harder-to-run games like Midnight Club: Chain Reaction, we need to reduce the resolution to 2x to maintain smooth gameplay.

Next, we'll play some Sega Saturn games using the Yobasi and Shiro Core emulators. Even more challenging games like Sega Rally run at full speed without any issues. We'll also test out GameCube games, including Automotista, which runs smoothly as well.

**Adding Additional Features**

Finally, let's take a look at some additional features that make this mini PC stand out. We have the "Omega Drive" theme, which is one of our favorites. From the RetroArch menu, we can go to each console and view their box art or videos. We also have access to handhelds, where we can see a list of games and emulators.

Overall, this little mini PC makes an excellent retro arcade setup. It's compact, easy to use, and can handle a wide range of systems.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to turn this 80 mini lenovo pc into an awesome little emulation machine this is going to be capable of running dreamcast n64 sega saturn gamecube wii unfortunately we don't have quite enough power to play a lot of ps2 games but some will work and basically anything underneath what i just mentioned so we have nes neo geo fba this will even do maim at full speed this is known as a lenovo think center m93p we have an i5 4570t and the version i have only has four gigs of ram but you can scoop these up anywhere from 60 to 100 and right now they're around 80 bucks with eight gigs of ram and no hard drive now the operating system that we're going to be using on this is bottocera and i'm going to install it to an ssd you can always run this from an external usb drive if you want to but in this video i'm going to show you how to install it to an internal drive and in order to easily do that i'm just going to be using this cheap sata to usb adapter this is going to allow me to plug it right into my pc and flash bottosera directly to the ssd but remember this can also be done with a usb drive if you don't want to install an ssd i just picked up this cheap 240 gigabyte drive and it's gonna work out perfectly and this is what all of my games and operating system are going to be running from in this little lenovo pc so along with the mini pc my ssd and the sata adapter i also have a controller this is the fly digi apex it uses a 2.4 gigahertz dongle so it'll connect right up to basically any operating system now it doesn't necessarily have to be wireless so if you do have a wired controller laying around you can always use that and the last thing i recommend having is an external drive with your games now the only reason we're going to be using this drive is to plug it into usb while we're running botocera go into the file management system and transfer our games from this drive to the internal ssd that we're using in this mini pc it just makes it a lot easier to get games over there so we don't have to be connected online to do network transfer or anything like that so now that i have all of my parts ready i'm going to go ahead and install botocera to this ssd i'm going to be doing this from a windows machine but this will also work on mac or linux okay so let's go ahead and get botocera installed on this ssd as you can see i already have it plugged in with that sata to usb adapter first thing we're going to need is botocera itself so we'll head over to the website i'll leave a link for this in the description we're going to choose download and we want to get the desktop version the 64-bit version we'll just choose the direct link it's going to download for us while this is downloading we're going to pick up another application to allow us to flash this to the ssd or usb drive if you choose to go that route this works with mac windows or linux from the drop drop-down we have mac linux and windows i'm using a windows machine so i'm going to grab the portable version once both of these are finished downloading i'm just going to place them on my desktop for easy access and we'll get this installed all right so i have etcher amp auto sarah downloaded i'm just going to launch etcher here and from within etcher we're going to choose flash from file that's going to be the bottocera image that we downloaded mine's on my desktop we're going to choose our target device and this is listed as a j micron generic scsi disk because that's the little adapter i have this is my 240 gigabyte ssd that i'm going to be using so make sure we have this chosen to select now it's going to give me a warning because this is a larger drive but i am 100 positive that this is the ssd i have plugged in over usb yes i'm sure it's going to start flashing it and we're finished so we now have botocera installed on that ssd and like i mentioned this can be done from a usb drive and then when you're set up on the pc you can actually install botocera from within botocera to this drive but personally i think this is just so much easier you can pick up one of these sata to usb adapters for pretty cheap on amazon and i'll leave a link for them in the description now that we have this ready to go on the drive let's move over to that mini pc right so now i just need to install this ssd here i'm not going to mount it down yet um just to save a little bit of time for this video but i would recommend mounting it back down i also have the dongle for that controller i'm going to be using here i'll just place it in the front and we're now ready to boot this thing up all right so i'm just going to press this power button here and since this is the only drive i have in this pc it's automatically going to boot from that ssd if you have another drive installed in your pc and you're worried about it not booting from the bottom drive while your system is booting you can go into the bios or the boot menu on this specific machine here press f12 while it's booting up and you can choose that ssd but if you don't have any other drives installed it's automatically going to boot from that drive and we're now running botocero on this mini pc this controller acts like an xbox 360 controller and right out of the box this is already set up ready to go but if your controller is not detected you will need a keyboard to get into the controller settings and once we have our keyboard plugged in we can press the space bar that's going to bring us to the main menu press enter and from here choose controller settings grab your controller hold the a button and it'll bring us into the configuration wizard it walks you through on how to set this up i mean everything you need to know is on screen and as for my hotkey i always set that as select so now that we have our controller set up we can actually start playing some games because there are some freeware games pre-installed with botocera but we probably want to add our own and i'm going to walk you through that it's actually super easy to do so remember i mentioned that i have an external drive here with some games on it now it doesn't have to be an external hard drive it could be just a usb drive with your games on it what we're going to do is go ahead and plug it into our bottocera machine and once we have this all up and running we're going to get into the file manager that way we can easily transfer our games or our roms from our external drive to the internal drive we have bottocera installed on and for that you will need your mouse and keyboard plugged into the machine so what i'm going to do now is just connect this to my game capture so it's a lot easier to see okay so now that we have that drive plugged in we're going to press f1 from our keyboard this is going to bring us into the file manager now in my opinion this is definitely a really easy way to get your games transferred over you can always do this over network if you want to or set up a secondary drive but i personally like to have everything consolidated so this is the method that i use from the left hand side we're under share here's our bios folder all of our bios's are going to go in here here's our roms folder if we go in here you can see that we have the systems already listed now let's say we want to transfer a couple gamecube games over we're gonna find gamecube there's nothing in here i'm gonna take some gamecube games from that drive i have plugged in which is called my book in here i have another folder called games and this is going to be different depending on how you have your set up but this is my external drive got some dreamcast gamecube nes psp and playstation 1. i'm going to go into my gamecube folder and i have two games here i'm gonna copy these i'm gonna head back to my share folder roms gamecube because those are the games we want and i'm gonna paste them right in here and now these are transferring from my external drive to the internal ssd that we have bottocera installed on so now i have two gamecube games here i'm gonna go back to my book my games folder where i have my games located got some dreamcast in here and take my dreamcast games go back to share roms i'm going to find dreamcast and i'm going to paste them in here it's really that simple i'm gonna go one more here we'll go back to my book games i'll do psp take my psp games share roms i'll find psp from here and i'll just paste them in i'll let this finish up now that this is finished up i'm going to go to file close window it's going to bring us right back into emulation station and if we scroll through here you might notice that those games we just added aren't here yet that's because we need to do a restart or we can rescan the games personally i just press start on my controller quit restart system and now you can see we have our dreamcast psp i also added some gamecube games here now if we go into each one of these folders you might notice we don't have any kind of artwork and in order to scrape this correctly you will need to be online for this to work you can either use wi-fi or ethernet if you want to connect to wi-fi press start on your controller network settings enable wi-fi as long as you have wi-fi installed on your pc you're going to put in your ssid and your wi-fi password personally i like connecting over ethernet because all i got to do is plug a cable in all right so i've plugged in my ethernet you can see that i'm connected to the internet and now we want to add some box art because if i go into dreamcast we don't have anything listed press start on your controller scrape from here i use the gamesdb and kind of leave everything default i go to scrape now all my systems are selected but for this video i'm going to deselect everything except for dreamcast just takes a little while we now have one system selected we'll choose start up in the top right hand corner it's going to give us a status on scraping says we're finished up now if we go in here we still don't have any box art but what we need to do is press start game settings update games list and there we have it and it actually missed marvel vs capcom 2. it always misses this one because i have it named weird but as you can see it's got everything else for me and we got a little bit of box art just to make it look a little better but that's about it i mean you're now set to play with this little mini pc i'm actually just gonna show you some games running in psp we'll do some sega saturn and some gamecube just to show you how this thing performs so real quick before we get into gameplay since i'm using this little machine here in order to get sound out of hdmi i need to press start on my controller i'm going to go to system settings from here i'm going to go to audio output and i'm going to set this to hdmi 0. that's going to enable audio out over hdmi with this specific machine now if you're on a different machine you may need to choose a different one but i know for a fact that hdmi zero works on this tiny lenovo so first up we have some psp with chains of olympus i'm at 2x resolution here works great the easier to run games can go to three and four x but when it comes to the harder ones to run like midnight club chains of olympus and ghost of sparta you will need to take it down to two but we're using that opengl back in and it works amazingly another one that this little machine runs really well is sega saturn this is using the yobasi and shiro core inside of retro arch and even sega rally runs at full speed this little thing also handles the harder to run gamecube games like automotista here as you can see we're running it full speed and it'll even do wii games so yeah i personally think that these tiny pcs make great little emulation setups if you want to do a standalone setup like this or add it to an arcade cabinet now there's a few more things that i wanted to go over before we get out of here and it really just has to do with customization this is the stock theme that we've been looking at the whole time but we can install different ones by pressing start on our controller and in order for this to work you will need to be online from here scroll down to updates and downloads themes and we can choose themes from here there's a few awesome ones that i personally really like like this one here es theme forever we'll install it and i'll also install one of my favorites omega drive so we'll give this a second to download both of them are successfully installed we'll go back to the menu ui settings and from here we can choose which one we want i'm going to go with es themes forever first we'll just back up it's going to swap it out for us and this one's really more made for videos because right in the middle there we have some videos and for these i haven't downloaded any but everything that's already pre-installed should have a video next one we'll take a look at is one of my favorites omega drive so from here we have our consoles and if we go into each one see it brings up our box art or if you have videos it'll bring up your videos and i really do like the way this looks we can also go over to handhelds so overall it's definitely a nice little setup this was just kind of a quick start guide to get you up and running showed you how to add some games pretty easily and get this all installed on an ssd if you run into issues i would suggest heading over to the bottosera website they do have a forum and they got some really awesome people over there to help you out if you're interested in picking up a mini pc like this i will leave a few links in the description your best bet is to hit up ebay and see what you can find as making this video i saw several of them for sale anywhere from 70 to 100 but that's gonna wrap it up for this one and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today i'm going to show you how to turn this 80 mini lenovo pc into an awesome little emulation machine this is going to be capable of running dreamcast n64 sega saturn gamecube wii unfortunately we don't have quite enough power to play a lot of ps2 games but some will work and basically anything underneath what i just mentioned so we have nes neo geo fba this will even do maim at full speed this is known as a lenovo think center m93p we have an i5 4570t and the version i have only has four gigs of ram but you can scoop these up anywhere from 60 to 100 and right now they're around 80 bucks with eight gigs of ram and no hard drive now the operating system that we're going to be using on this is bottocera and i'm going to install it to an ssd you can always run this from an external usb drive if you want to but in this video i'm going to show you how to install it to an internal drive and in order to easily do that i'm just going to be using this cheap sata to usb adapter this is going to allow me to plug it right into my pc and flash bottosera directly to the ssd but remember this can also be done with a usb drive if you don't want to install an ssd i just picked up this cheap 240 gigabyte drive and it's gonna work out perfectly and this is what all of my games and operating system are going to be running from in this little lenovo pc so along with the mini pc my ssd and the sata adapter i also have a controller this is the fly digi apex it uses a 2.4 gigahertz dongle so it'll connect right up to basically any operating system now it doesn't necessarily have to be wireless so if you do have a wired controller laying around you can always use that and the last thing i recommend having is an external drive with your games now the only reason we're going to be using this drive is to plug it into usb while we're running botocera go into the file management system and transfer our games from this drive to the internal ssd that we're using in this mini pc it just makes it a lot easier to get games over there so we don't have to be connected online to do network transfer or anything like that so now that i have all of my parts ready i'm going to go ahead and install botocera to this ssd i'm going to be doing this from a windows machine but this will also work on mac or linux okay so let's go ahead and get botocera installed on this ssd as you can see i already have it plugged in with that sata to usb adapter first thing we're going to need is botocera itself so we'll head over to the website i'll leave a link for this in the description we're going to choose download and we want to get the desktop version the 64-bit version we'll just choose the direct link it's going to download for us while this is downloading we're going to pick up another application to allow us to flash this to the ssd or usb drive if you choose to go that route this works with mac windows or linux from the drop drop-down we have mac linux and windows i'm using a windows machine so i'm going to grab the portable version once both of these are finished downloading i'm just going to place them on my desktop for easy access and we'll get this installed all right so i have etcher amp auto sarah downloaded i'm just going to launch etcher here and from within etcher we're going to choose flash from file that's going to be the bottocera image that we downloaded mine's on my desktop we're going to choose our target device and this is listed as a j micron generic scsi disk because that's the little adapter i have this is my 240 gigabyte ssd that i'm going to be using so make sure we have this chosen to select now it's going to give me a warning because this is a larger drive but i am 100 positive that this is the ssd i have plugged in over usb yes i'm sure it's going to start flashing it and we're finished so we now have botocera installed on that ssd and like i mentioned this can be done from a usb drive and then when you're set up on the pc you can actually install botocera from within botocera to this drive but personally i think this is just so much easier you can pick up one of these sata to usb adapters for pretty cheap on amazon and i'll leave a link for them in the description now that we have this ready to go on the drive let's move over to that mini pc right so now i just need to install this ssd here i'm not going to mount it down yet um just to save a little bit of time for this video but i would recommend mounting it back down i also have the dongle for that controller i'm going to be using here i'll just place it in the front and we're now ready to boot this thing up all right so i'm just going to press this power button here and since this is the only drive i have in this pc it's automatically going to boot from that ssd if you have another drive installed in your pc and you're worried about it not booting from the bottom drive while your system is booting you can go into the bios or the boot menu on this specific machine here press f12 while it's booting up and you can choose that ssd but if you don't have any other drives installed it's automatically going to boot from that drive and we're now running botocero on this mini pc this controller acts like an xbox 360 controller and right out of the box this is already set up ready to go but if your controller is not detected you will need a keyboard to get into the controller settings and once we have our keyboard plugged in we can press the space bar that's going to bring us to the main menu press enter and from here choose controller settings grab your controller hold the a button and it'll bring us into the configuration wizard it walks you through on how to set this up i mean everything you need to know is on screen and as for my hotkey i always set that as select so now that we have our controller set up we can actually start playing some games because there are some freeware games pre-installed with botocera but we probably want to add our own and i'm going to walk you through that it's actually super easy to do so remember i mentioned that i have an external drive here with some games on it now it doesn't have to be an external hard drive it could be just a usb drive with your games on it what we're going to do is go ahead and plug it into our bottocera machine and once we have this all up and running we're going to get into the file manager that way we can easily transfer our games or our roms from our external drive to the internal drive we have bottocera installed on and for that you will need your mouse and keyboard plugged into the machine so what i'm going to do now is just connect this to my game capture so it's a lot easier to see okay so now that we have that drive plugged in we're going to press f1 from our keyboard this is going to bring us into the file manager now in my opinion this is definitely a really easy way to get your games transferred over you can always do this over network if you want to or set up a secondary drive but i personally like to have everything consolidated so this is the method that i use from the left hand side we're under share here's our bios folder all of our bios's are going to go in here here's our roms folder if we go in here you can see that we have the systems already listed now let's say we want to transfer a couple gamecube games over we're gonna find gamecube there's nothing in here i'm gonna take some gamecube games from that drive i have plugged in which is called my book in here i have another folder called games and this is going to be different depending on how you have your set up but this is my external drive got some dreamcast gamecube nes psp and playstation 1. i'm going to go into my gamecube folder and i have two games here i'm gonna copy these i'm gonna head back to my share folder roms gamecube because those are the games we want and i'm gonna paste them right in here and now these are transferring from my external drive to the internal ssd that we have bottocera installed on so now i have two gamecube games here i'm gonna go back to my book my games folder where i have my games located got some dreamcast in here and take my dreamcast games go back to share roms i'm going to find dreamcast and i'm going to paste them in here it's really that simple i'm gonna go one more here we'll go back to my book games i'll do psp take my psp games share roms i'll find psp from here and i'll just paste them in i'll let this finish up now that this is finished up i'm going to go to file close window it's going to bring us right back into emulation station and if we scroll through here you might notice that those games we just added aren't here yet that's because we need to do a restart or we can rescan the games personally i just press start on my controller quit restart system and now you can see we have our dreamcast psp i also added some gamecube games here now if we go into each one of these folders you might notice we don't have any kind of artwork and in order to scrape this correctly you will need to be online for this to work you can either use wi-fi or ethernet if you want to connect to wi-fi press start on your controller network settings enable wi-fi as long as you have wi-fi installed on your pc you're going to put in your ssid and your wi-fi password personally i like connecting over ethernet because all i got to do is plug a cable in all right so i've plugged in my ethernet you can see that i'm connected to the internet and now we want to add some box art because if i go into dreamcast we don't have anything listed press start on your controller scrape from here i use the gamesdb and kind of leave everything default i go to scrape now all my systems are selected but for this video i'm going to deselect everything except for dreamcast just takes a little while we now have one system selected we'll choose start up in the top right hand corner it's going to give us a status on scraping says we're finished up now if we go in here we still don't have any box art but what we need to do is press start game settings update games list and there we have it and it actually missed marvel vs capcom 2. it always misses this one because i have it named weird but as you can see it's got everything else for me and we got a little bit of box art just to make it look a little better but that's about it i mean you're now set to play with this little mini pc i'm actually just gonna show you some games running in psp we'll do some sega saturn and some gamecube just to show you how this thing performs so real quick before we get into gameplay since i'm using this little machine here in order to get sound out of hdmi i need to press start on my controller i'm going to go to system settings from here i'm going to go to audio output and i'm going to set this to hdmi 0. that's going to enable audio out over hdmi with this specific machine now if you're on a different machine you may need to choose a different one but i know for a fact that hdmi zero works on this tiny lenovo so first up we have some psp with chains of olympus i'm at 2x resolution here works great the easier to run games can go to three and four x but when it comes to the harder ones to run like midnight club chains of olympus and ghost of sparta you will need to take it down to two but we're using that opengl back in and it works amazingly another one that this little machine runs really well is sega saturn this is using the yobasi and shiro core inside of retro arch and even sega rally runs at full speed this little thing also handles the harder to run gamecube games like automotista here as you can see we're running it full speed and it'll even do wii games so yeah i personally think that these tiny pcs make great little emulation setups if you want to do a standalone setup like this or add it to an arcade cabinet now there's a few more things that i wanted to go over before we get out of here and it really just has to do with customization this is the stock theme that we've been looking at the whole time but we can install different ones by pressing start on our controller and in order for this to work you will need to be online from here scroll down to updates and downloads themes and we can choose themes from here there's a few awesome ones that i personally really like like this one here es theme forever we'll install it and i'll also install one of my favorites omega drive so we'll give this a second to download both of them are successfully installed we'll go back to the menu ui settings and from here we can choose which one we want i'm going to go with es themes forever first we'll just back up it's going to swap it out for us and this one's really more made for videos because right in the middle there we have some videos and for these i haven't downloaded any but everything that's already pre-installed should have a video next one we'll take a look at is one of my favorites omega drive so from here we have our consoles and if we go into each one see it brings up our box art or if you have videos it'll bring up your videos and i really do like the way this looks we can also go over to handhelds so overall it's definitely a nice little setup this was just kind of a quick start guide to get you up and running showed you how to add some games pretty easily and get this all installed on an ssd if you run into issues i would suggest heading over to the bottosera website they do have a forum and they got some really awesome people over there to help you out if you're interested in picking up a mini pc like this i will leave a few links in the description your best bet is to hit up ebay and see what you can find as making this video i saw several of them for sale anywhere from 70 to 100 but that's gonna wrap it up for this one and like always thanks for watching\n"