Retropie vs Recalbox vs Lakka vs Batocera - Best OS for Retro-gaming

You should stop using the Raspberry Pi. It is obsolete. Pi's were fun in their first 3-5 years, but no longer continue to deliver. A properly setup Pi costs above 100 bucks, if you can get one uberhaupt, which gets you a medieval 28nm processor, crappy storage and an ethernet connector that is better at being a tosti iron than serving IP packets.
Even a 25€ second hand MacMini 2009 with OpenEmu is a better box for retrogaming, even though it is on a 45nm chip. You usually get it with 8GB of RAM and a SATA SSD for that money, and even availability is better. But also the newer 2014 one with 4K HDMI and 14nm chip is cheaper than a Pi.

Don't have any issue with retropie menus, I have issues with retropie itself, sure it can do a lot of stuff but it does everything bad or half through. Some basic options (like a true kiosk mode, or define controllers per game) are not even there. Retropie just continue to be used because of its past fame but nowadays it would be like using dos instead of windows just for the sake of it. Let it die :)

Retropie allow using Redream, even if it's not easy, it's a big thing. Recalbox should include custom package

I used Retropie for 5+ years but now I've switched to Recalbox due to the much better performance on N64 and Dreamcast systems, I've been using Recalbox for nearly 3 weeks and I am surprised by the many hidden features they have, the one thing I miss from Retropie the most is that, in there you can have the systems and the ES Themes you really like and here in Recalbox you are given systems you wouldn't choose to have otherwise if you were given the choice. On the other hand, Retropie hasn't had an update since March 2022, it´s been 16 months since they last updated so they are getting very behind and I wonder if they have already quit or what is going on!! Cheers

Thank you for your work. But don't be shy to use your voice, it will make the video better.

Amazing content 🥺♥️

Congratulations for the analysis. It certainly took a lot of time and the video is rich of information.

I've built two systems in the last six months.
The first one I used was RetroPie, and while it gave me a lot of options I could play with, it was also difficult to get set up and running like I wanted it. To this day, I'm still tweaking it to get it to do certain things.

The second system I built, I used Batocera, and I was able to boot it up and run almost immediately with very little tweaking or configuring needed.

Definitely would recommend Batocera unless you just like to tinker and tweak and need a menu to do it. You can still do this in Batocera using the File manager, but you will need to know how the files are organized and where the various config files are located.

running recallbox with +10k roms and bioses from an ssd on the rasp pi 4, it all runs smoothly and you can tweak it a lot, or just go to the retrarch menu and tweak even more from there

There's no one-click solution for all things in the world. When you'll try to configure something, Retropie will just beat all the other platforms. You can't say that not-intuitive interface and a controller configuration are cons. Just read the instruction, isn;t that so hard to do?

great video, actually im trying to run gamecube games on the pi4b, but i cant figure out how to do it in retropie, could you help me out here ? thanks

I like Lakka because of the small size, but Batocera seems to have all tthe bells and whistles for me.

recalbox wins in my opinion

That was awesome man

caraio q video mais inutil da porra

So on any of these, is it possible to run steam games? Like can you back out to a main OS home screen and download steam? Obviously can't run big games on a Pi but maybe some little indie games

Спасибо большое! я начинающий и теперь знаю что начать лучше с Recalbox

Most reviewers forget to tell that Retropie is the only one that can handle PieMarquee2.
I tried all 4 and systems you tested out and as far as I know now Lakka, Recalbox and Batocera don't support a active marquee.
If youb manage to find a good configured and tuned Batocera image than the gameplay is (i.m.o.) the best, but since a few of my cabinets have a LCD marquee display I have to stick with Retropie for now. There is so much more to tell about all the different front-ends, but that would take ages.

Thank you! I've used retropie before but I kinda forgot about it now, I'll try Recalbox.

My understanding is that these aren't different OSes but just different frontends.

which ones would support a crappy usb controller that i threw together?

my favortie batocera on my raspberry, on Batocera OS my old netbook (not notbook) , and on USB SSD .(BATOCERA OS LIVE SSD)

I'm just gonna say... Android, currently. Works smooth as on Rpi 4, the others are a bit jankier. Lakka is close.

Based on performance i will try Batocera and Recalbox i hate how complicated Retropie is

Game loading time wasn't exactly fair as you can disable that menu on retropie. It's listerally sitting there doing nothing while it waits to see if you want to config anything. That doesn't count against game load time, as it's not loading the game, but rather, waiting for your input. Also, performance on retropie could have been better if you selected another emulator for that game using said menu before the game launches. But, as you said, this test was based on out of the box. over all, I agree with you.

Uso o Recalbox em um miniPC tenho problema de lentidão em jogos de PS2 e Wii, vou testar o Batocera para ver se melhora. De resto o Recalbox é muito bom e facil de usar. I use Recalbox on a miniPC I have a problem with slowness in PS2 and Wii games, I'm going to test Batocera to see if it improves. Otherwise Recalbox is very good and easy to use.

Thx for the video bro, i love ur music btw

great video! love it. looking forward to trying recalbox. i love that it has TI 99 4a and all the other 80s shit

I'd go with Lakka.

Thank you. Very relaxing and informative presentation.

Lakka is the best I think you can wait to play that much for the other functions that you get

I just started out with emulation on Rasperry Pi 4 and evaluated Batocera. To me, it was an extreme experience in regards to the user interface! Absolutely gorgeous and with synthwave music playing in the background that is a pleasure to see on your TV

The things I found out about Batocera were however (on version 33):
- On GBA and GB there was tons of lag when using the scanlines filtering (which I do). When turned off, and just 'blocky' it works fine. On all the other consoles I tested, the scanlines filter worked great. Using no scanlines filter really looks like garbage on a big tv screen (my opinion).
- In my test of multiple games, I found out that the sound all of a sudden would disappear in Batocera even though the Output was unchanged. Only thing happening was me opening and quitting like 5-7 games within 10 minutes to check them out. After some time (or after a restart) the sound/music would come back again.

Intesting video, I only tried recalbox but if I have time to lose, I'll try to install retropie someday ;)

You didn't mention sound. Batocera suffers from no sound on many Playstation titles.

Batocera is so much better than Retropie. It has animated themes and the ui makes sense. Retropie looks so outdated and it's so inconsistent. The only thing big it has going for it is the ability to add and update emulators and apps. I only use Retropie if it's the only option. Like on desktop Linux.

If Lakka met its stated design goals, it would appeal more to the masses. But ...

1) "If the hardware allows for it, Lakka will run without an X11 server."
2) "Perfect for giving your old discarded laptop or HTPC a second lease on life by repurposing it as a retro games console."

Not even close, especially when it comes to Audio (HDMI, 3.5mm jack, Bluetooth) and Bluetooth Controllers. I have both old & new gear that run perfectly with the latest Linux distros, but fail with at least 1 of the 2 points when attempting to use Lakka. Adding bluez* and PulseAudio as optional services would go a LONG way without requiring an X11 service (which NO ONE uses any longer), eh?

Retropie controller management is wild hahaha it really is especially when you're trying to play 4 player Mario kart

I find the Recalbox releases very appealing at first, but eventually very amateurish and often unfinished. They really want to get their OS to buzz and are very active on social meida, and one of their strategies is to put out updates that have not been sufficiently tested. As a result, you often end up having to hit their forum to find workarounds to bugs on things that used to working fine before update. I'll add that the developers do not take criticism very well and tend to blame users. The latest example is their v.8, which introduces a number of experience-breaking bugs. For instance, Kodi is rendered completely unusable and therefore, a lot of us had to either spend their Xmas holidays without watching movies, or install another OS. Recalbox also refused to allow users to rollback on their broken update, blaming the bugs on their community who did not sufficiently test their beta versions (yes, you read this ok, the thread is on their forum, albeit in French). That's why I decided to move to Batocera, which seems far more friendly a team and a lot less concerned with fame and glitters.

Personnaly i think lakka has the best

Spot on vid. I started off with retropie but the controller config was frustrating at best. Really love recal. Thanks

Retropie is certainly very configurable, but since i installed a Recalbox custom image for my GPi case i certainly think the latter is much easier. Did not had do fiddle with it at all. With Retropie i had to fine tune many emulators for different systems.

p4 looses ground to android board..with emuelec it's way better than retropie or batocera, eventhough emuelec looks like retropie with a nice frontend.

I will try recalbox but can I make game saves?

So this comparison is for absolute beginners? I would've liked to see the comparison with all os with optimal settings.

Acredito eu que o Emuelec esteja mais otimizado hoje em dia.

Batocera is easy to use, so stable :)

Batocera always