Download Games to Batocera Natively using Firefox

Recently, we have purchased an old Dell OptiPlex 9020 and looked for a Zotac GTX 1660 Super with a very low price from the local market selling used stuff at my country, it’s for my little brother to get him started at gaming.

We have done some modifications to install the graphics card into that PC like upgrading the power supply along with adding two SSD drives which resulted in a great performance for gaming specifically at 1080p resolution.

The Problem

As might be expected, we have decided to do Retro Gaming as well and that’s when we came across Batocera and actually installed it on the secondary internal SSD instead of an USB stick alongside Windows which is installed on the primary drive.

We had two options to transfer game files or ROMs to the SSD containing Batocera, either by moving them to an USB stick or just by using the file manager to access the SSD drive of Windows then copy data from there.

Ideally, we wanted the files to be saved on the SSD directly from Batocera without going to another PC or booting to windows and also not by using an external storage device or transfering them through the network which is recommended by the instructions on the official wiki.

In most scenarios, we had to boot first to Windows and download the files from there then use the methods available to transfer tha data which requires another restart process to boot Batocera again and copy the files which is a hassle obviously.

The Solution

Apparently, we had to figure out the way to download and add games natively running on Batocera without restarting and booting back to Windows, which is now possible even on the latest version of Batocera.

Required Applications

You only have to make use of two applications available on the Flatpak Package Manager which are:

• Firefox (Popular browser available for Linux distributions)
• PeaZip (Free archiver utility to extract files)

Installation

You can install the required packages on Batocera easily, make sure you are connected to the internet and follow the steps starting from the main screen:

1. Open the File Manager by pressing F1 on your keyboard.
2. Navigate to “Applications” from the left sidebar.
3. Launch “flatpak-config” from the shortcut.
4. Search for “firefox” and then “peazip” from the search bar.
5. Click on the “Install” green button for both applications.

Once finished, open “xterm” from the “Applications” menu then type the following command:

batocera-flatpak-update

Press Enter to apply the command, now you can find both applications available in the “Ports” at the main screen of Batocera.

Fix Firefox

By defult, when downloading files from Firefox it will not save your files which is a problem that we can solve by issuing the following command using “xterm” from the “Applications” menu:

flatpak override --filesystem=host org.mozilla.firefox

You can now download any file you want from Firefox and it will save just fine.

You can exit the “xterm” application by typing “exit” as a command and pressing Enter.

Set Path for Downloads

So, open Firefox from the “Ports” section in the main screen then click on the row of bars on the upper right corner of the browser to bring up the menu. Now, you will see the options, from there select “Settings”.

Scroll down till you find “Downloads” and “Save files to” this is the path of the downloads folder, note that down or just remember it so you can navigate to it from the PeaZip application after you download your ROMs.

Alternatively, you can create your own folder at any location you want and set it to that path by clicking on Browse and selecting your own path.

The Process

It’s so easy to achieve what we want now, I will summarize it in a few points.

Download ROMs

Simply, navigate to your favorite website for downloading game ROMs like you would normally do on any operating system by using Firefox as a browser.

Extract ROMs

Open PeaZip from the “Ports” section in the main screen then navigate to the downloads folder path that you have just noted. Find your ROM file and select it then click on “Extract” from the options above then click on the OK button.

Add ROMs

Open File Manager from the main screen by pressing on F1 then navigate to the downloads folder path again but this time you will find the extracted raw file which you can then copy to your relevant “roms” directory in Batocera.