How to make a portable usb that works with linux desktop?

10 months ago by Grumpy404 to c/emulation

I know there are projects like batocera for example but i want something i cant transfer from one device to another and just boot it up from my last save. Like i want it to work portable with various linux desktops os's without the need to boot into a emulation os?

Does this make sense? if so how may i do it as a newcomer? What would you advise?

Die4Ever 2 points 10 months ago

You want a live boot USB stick with multiple distros? Or just one distro? I think multiple live distros on a single stick would be hard.

If you just want to test multiple distros you can use Ventoy, but I don't know if you can get it to retain data, it's really just for OS installers.

A live boot of a single distro should be easy, but I don't know which ones are good for that.

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Grumpy404 1 point 10 months ago

I'm not quite sure but i guess i need 1 ditsro because i fear more than that would be annoying? but is batercera the best choice or are there others? Sorry im really bad with wording and explaining things.

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Die4Ever 2 points 10 months ago

Batocera is great but I don't think it has a regular desktop environment. So you couldn't like browse the internet or use Steam.

If you use a different distro I think EmuDeck will give you the same emulators with the same frontend

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turkalino 2 points 10 months ago

It’s possible, it’s just gonna require some configuration on each machine you wanna use. I only have experience with RetroArch but I doubt the steps for other platforms will be much different

In RetroArch, you can change the root folders for both roms and save files. Let’s say you do /mnt/emustick/roms and /mnt/emustick/saves. Then, you follow the steps for your OS and make it so that whenever you insert your portable drive, it automatically mounts to /mnt/emustick

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Grumpy404 1 point 10 months ago

Would i be better off with batocera or some os of that nature?

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turkalino 2 points 10 months ago

I haven’t used it before but reading their website, it does sound like it would save you from needing to configure each individual device you want to use. Sounds like what you want

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