Table of Contents

Advanced Pico Beena

The Advanced Pico Beena (アドバンスピコ・ビーナ) is an educational video game console developed by Sega Toys and released on August 6, 2005 exclusively in Japan. It is the direct successor to the Sega Pico (1993) and is often considered Sega's final console, albeit an educational one.

The name “Beena” was chosen to sound like the first syllables of “Be Natural”. Unlike the Sega Pico which was based on Mega Drive/Genesis hardware, the Beena uses a 32-bit ARM7TDMI CPU running at 81 MHz. Games come on book-shaped cartridges called Storyware, each containing a physical booklet with artwork pages — turning a page changes the on-screen content.

Key features over its predecessor:

  • Magic Pen stylus input (with optional second pen for multiplayer)
  • SD card slot for game saves
  • Parental playtime controls
  • Adaptive difficulty based on player skill
  • Can be played without a television

Targeted at children aged 2-8, the Beena's library focused on educational content featuring popular Japanese franchises like Pretty Cure, Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Kamen Rider, and various Super Sentai series. A cheaper revision, the Beena Lite, was released on July 17, 2008. As of 2010, Sega estimated 4.1 million Beena consoles sold along with 20 million game cartridges. No new games were released after 2011.

This system scrapes metadata for the “beena” group(s) and loads the beena set from the currently selected theme, if available.

Quick reference

BIOS

MD5 checksum Share file path Description
bios/beena.zip Beena BIOS ROM set

The beena.zip BIOS file must match the version of MAME used in your version of Batocera. You can verify your BIOS files from the Batocera menu: GAME SETTINGS > MISSING BIOS CHECK.

ROMs

Place your Advanced Pico Beena ROMs in /userdata/roms/beena.

Beena games were distributed on proprietary Storyware cartridges. ROM dumps are typically available as .bin files or in .zip archives.

Emulators

MAME

MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a multi-purpose emulation framework. The Beena driver in MAME supports most standard inputs but may not fully support game-specific peripherals.

RetroArch

RetroArch (formerly SSNES), is a ubiquitous frontend that can run multiple “cores”, which are essentially the emulators themselves. The most common cores use the libretro API, so that's why cores run in RetroArch in Batocera are referred to as “libretro: (core name)”. RetroArch aims to unify the feature set of all libretro cores and offer a universal, familiar interface independent of platform.

RetroArch configuration

RetroArch offers a Quick Menu accessed by pressing [HOTKEY] + South button (B SNES) which can be used to alter various things like RetroArch and core options, and controller mapping. Most RetroArch related settings can be altered from Batocera's EmulationStation.

libretro: MAME

The libretro version of MAME can be used to emulate the Advanced Pico Beena. It uses the same BIOS and ROM sets as the standalone version.

Controls

The original Beena used a Magic Pen (stylus) as its primary input method, along with face buttons on the console. A mouse can be used to simulate the stylus input.

The Beena's Storyware cartridges have physical pages that the player flips to change the on-screen content. In emulation, page turning is typically mapped to specific buttons.

See also

Troubleshooting

Black screen on boot

Make sure the correct BIOS file (beena.zip) is in /userdata/bios/ and matches the MAME version used in Batocera. Use GAME SETTINGS > MISSING BIOS CHECK to verify.

Emulation issues

The Beena MAME driver is still a work in progress. Some games may not work correctly or may have graphical/audio glitches. Inputs requiring game-specific peripherals may not be fully supported.

Further troubleshooting

For further troubleshooting, refer to the generic support pages.