Expandability and customisation

The ability to make things work the way you want and to add some extras.

If anything, the RetroPie main menu (Start button) is rather stripped down when compared to the other systems. However, the RetroPie configuration menu is much more detailed, with more scope for customisation than the other systems on test here. The downside is that some configuration options require more work than on the other systems, and this is a pain if you don’t have a keyboard connected. The configuration menus have lots of scripts to download and set up all sorts of software options. Installing the Pixel desktop, as an example, gives you a full desktop environment, and it was as simple as finding the correct menu option to run the installer script.

If you are installing RetroPie to an existing PC-based Linux desktop, many of the configuration and expansion options are left to you to install. The same can be said for a RetroArch installation on an existing Linux desktop.

Batocera certainly isn’t a dead end when it comes to expansion, but it isn’t as flexible as RetroPie or RetroArch. To give an example, there are instructions to add Steam, for modern gaming, to the system (PC only). However, we found that some of the procedures for doing these things were quite longwinded and not all of them worked properly. Within the interface, there is a theme downloader that offers dozens of themes that radically alter the way the interface looks and works, and they all come with star ratings.

With Recalbox, again, there are ways of adding extra programs, but it felt like going against the grain on a system that’s not designed to be highly customisable.