wtf is batocera-skills?

This project packages a year of hands on experience running a real arcade cabinet into a set of skills for coding assistants like Claude Code. Batocera is a popular retro gaming operating system used to build home arcade cabinets, and while its wiki covers the basics, day to day tasks like curating a big game library, lining up bezel artwork, or keeping the system responsive after an update tend to rely on knowledge that only comes from experience. This repository turns that hard won knowledge into five focused, on demand guides your coding assistant can load when relevant. The first skill, batocera ops, covers connecting to the cabinet over SSH, understanding its file layout, and a safe way to verify changes remotely by launching something and taking a screenshot rather than needing a physical controller. The other four build on that foundation: batocera roms covers organizing your game files and checking that your copies match known good versions, batocera display covers shaders and bezel artwork alignment, batocera tuning covers fixing a slow or laggy system and a specific bug where the system gets stuck in a low power mode, and batocera maintenance covers running scheduled jobs, backing up your data, and safely surviving version upgrades. The skills are meant to be used with an AI coding assistant that has direct access to your cabinet over SSH as the root user, which is a significant level of access, so the author recommends reviewing what each skill does before installing and changing your cabinet's default password first. The included scripts are designed to be safe by default: many support a dry run mode, back up your settings before changing them, and avoid deleting files outright in favor of hiding them. It installs as a Claude Code plugin, or you can copy the skill folders manually into any compatible assistant's skills directory. It has been tested on Batocera versions 41 through 43 and is released under the MIT License.