What You Need
- The SD card that comes with your MM is cheap trash and WILL fail. Buy a suitably-sized SD card. If you want to use the entire Tiny Best Set romset, you’ll need at least a 128GBs card. Don’t cheap out on this, get a Sandisk or Samsung card, they’re like $15 on Amazon.
- An SD card adapter if your computer doesn’t have an SD card slot. I don’t recommend using the one that comes with the device, like the SD, it’s cheap trash and it may corrupt your card.
- A reliable USB cable. You know the drill by now, don’t rely on the included one.
- Install fat32format if you’re using Windows.
- Install a torrent client like qbittorrent so you can download the TBS romset efficiently (skip if you already have ROMs and will be skipping that section).
Before Starting…
To begin with and as an optional step, grab the SD card that came with your device and backup its BIOS directory: RetroArch/.retroarch/system
We’re not going to be using it at all, but it might come in handy if you want to play more consoles later. If your device didn’t have an SD card, just skip this step. After this is done, throw it in the trash.
Onion Desktop Tools
If you’re on Windows and your firmware is up-to-date (see Update Your Firmware below), you may be able to use Onion Desktop Tools to greatly simplify this process and skip many of the next steps.
ODT is a user-friendly Windows application that will let you install Onion from scratch on a new SD card, migrate data over from the stock SD card, amongst many other features. It might be worth checking out even after you’ve completed this tutorial!
If you don’t qualify for ODT or are not interested in using it, just follow the steps below to get your Onion up and running in no time!