@dankcushions Awesome. Thanking you kindly sir!

@dlcgiovanni
That error could be related to this:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/395/retropie-3-7-child-friendly-emulationstation-wont-start?page=1

thanks, successfully compiled it and soul calibur works in versus battle mode (2 players)!
download source from here:
https://github.com/RetroPie/reicast-emulator

just be sure to compile reicast in the /usr/local/bin/reicast directory and first install all the developer buildings before you type and enter "make clean && make":
sudo apt-get install
libasound2
libegl1-mesa-dev
libgles2-mesa-dev
libasound2-dev
mesa-common-dev
libgl1-mesa-dev

in the end you'll get two files in the shell/linux/ directory. you just need the reicast.elf. but rename reicast.elf to reicast (without file-ending) and copy it over to /opt/retropie/emulators/reicast.
but make a backup before you replace the old file.

@phillymadison
Drop the .cue and .bin files of the game into the segacd folder, yet I should advice you of something: Rpi2 and 3 has only 1GB of RAM and CD images has around 600mbs, as result the emulator can delay the loading of game and some sounds...
The best practices are extract the audio to wave format, keep the data into bin format and create a cue file (which contain the list of the files and also the type and which order those should be played), that way only loads the required audio file instead load the entire "CD", which improve the loading times of the sountrack a lot, the same can be applied to psx games as well.

The question is how you do that?

Pick an original CD or a CD image and open with isobuster (http://www.isobuster.com/)

Extract data into a folder

rename the data track into "name_of_the_game_track 1.bin"

rename the sound files into "name_of_the_game_track 2.wav", "name_of_the_game_track 3.wav", "name_of_the_game_track 4.wav", etc.
Try rename those in the right order.

Generate the Cue file by using the sega cue generator (http://www.racketboy.com/downloads/sega-cue-maker.htm)

Save the Cue file into the folder where the others files are, you can keep the name "game_of_the_game.cue"

Edit the /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg and remove the ".bin" format from the platforms that uses CD's, to only show up the cue files on the game list, otherwise if you boot a bin file it wont load the sounds.

PS: it's important to rename the files, otherwise if you leave the files names simple as "track 1 and 2 and 3" it will overwrite with existent files from other games.

EDIT:
I forgot you also need BIOS and those are renamed differently according which emulator you use, you can find more about it here:
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Sega-CD

It could be worth you checking out this page.
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

Please note that only the Retroarch based emulators use the "default" hotkeys, other emulators will need their own configs (as you have found above). The retroarch ones are identified with the 'lr' prefix.

You can set the default Retroarch render res and also the video res using the Runcommand
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/runcommand

I'm a total newbie about to make a very simular setup, so I wonder if this is working out for you or there are any problems?

Having one insert coin button (and not two) , and 2) having it double as select. Having Hotkey and Exit Emulator set to the same button?

Thank you very much :)

Yup....seems to be working and Scrape is running as we speak. I read some other threads and it appears most do not shut the pi down; is that true? Any concerns with heat or with having the Ethernet left connected?

@BenWlson it's actually not in the experimental menu: it's in raspi-tools:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/FAQ#where-did-the-desktop-go

I find the default.cfg

tried to edit but was full of strange symbols, so i deleted it, and now all works fine.

Thany you all guys !:)

Looks like that did it, hilarious because I could have sworn I didn't do that before and it worked. Rookie mistake thanks a ton!

That sux. Its not that big of a deal really. Could be worse I guess ,like you said.
Edit: Did a clean install and did not install the touchscreen drivers. Problem solved

@senkun

Yes, i am using wifi. And it seems so, that if it finds the network at First try, everything is fine exept the emulationstation cutting the video.

And i Have allready disabled the USB ROM service, and it only got rid one of the initial two identical fail errors.

And i Will try that delay sequence. Is the value in seconds?

Is editing the fstab the only way to get RetroPie to mount a USB drive then?

@wetriner said in Use of external hard-drives (exFAT) for SAMBA share and rom-storage?:

In smb.conf in /etc/samba, there's a section at the bottom with all your shared directories. For example:

[configs] comment = configs path = "/opt/retropie/configs" writeable = yes guest ok = yes create mask = 0644 directory mask = 0755 force user = pi

All you should really have to do is follow this as a template and change the path, comment, and name. Your usb external hard drive probably gets mounted to /media/usb, although there's probably a by-id directory that you could use in case of wanting to distinguish between two or more drives.

You can store roms on it of course. The question would be really how you would want to implement the ability to use them. You could mount your usb drive straight into your roms directory, so it would just override everything on the sd if plugged in. You could also create a symbolic link to a subdirectory in each of your rom folders, so your hard drive roms would show up as a directory within each system's gamelist. Or you could make a copy of each of the systems you want in es_systems.cfg and have those point to something like /media/usb/snes.

so the exFAT format isn't problematic after all?