@mitu said in Speeding up retropie boot up on a Pi zero and turning off BT & WiFi..:

@MachLid One thing you can do to speed up the boot is to disable file shares (Samba services). From what I've noticed, this is one of the services that takes up a lot of time (proportional to the total boot time) to start up.
I've looked up in the RetroPie-Setup script and you only have the options to remove Samba completely (not disable it), so you'd have to use the command line to disable the services manually.

sudo systemctl disable smbd sudo systemctl disable nmbd

More ideas and help!! thank you very much, and I'm also going to try this as well.
I have no problem killing anything unnecessary on it in order to speed up booting into the game selection menu.
What I'm hoping to do with this Pi Zero is simply and only use it for mostly Atari 2600 stuff and maybe some popular arcade games from pre 1990's or earlier (if it'll handle it).
I grew up with a Atari 2600 and lots of this stuff thru out the 1980s,, and thought it'd be neat to have something very little and compact (and even battery powered) and be able to quickly power on, and play some of the true classics. Not sure what I'm doing yet for a compact and portable housing or anything like that yet,, I just wanted to square away the working parts first.

Thanks again.