Is Retropie right for me? Are there alternatives?

ubernub

Hello everyone. I am trying to accomplish three things with my Pi.

1: I want to run a small intranet website on it. (LAMP stack)

2: I want to use it for both playing media (movies, music, photos) and for serving them to other devices on the network. (Plex?)

3: I want to use it for playing emulated games.

Goals 1 and 2 require the system to never reboot, because remote users would at least temporarily lose access to their content. I like the look of Retropie. The Emulation Station software looks like a good way to handle all the emulators. I don't like that I have to boot into a separate partition to get to it.

Is there a way to have all these goals coexist in a single environment? If Retropie can't do it, what are some alternatives? It also has to be user friendly enough that kids and a non-linux-savvy fiance can navigate it. Please help!

Pi Model: 3 B

HPK-de

Hi,

the only problem i see is, you have to reboot the pi from time to time when using it for emulation.
It depends on what system you want to emulate, but sometimes one of these old games "hangs" and you have to restart by pulling the power or something.

If you like console games you maybe fine, but if you want to emulate amiga, DOS or something like that, some games cause a bit of trouble ;).

ubernub

I want to emulate the nintendo consoles, ps1 (and ps2 if it's possible), and maybe sega saturn. No need for any others.

ubernub

So, how do I get games, plus media streaming to other devices, and playing media directly on the same machine, all within the same boot?

HPK-de

@ubernub said in Is Retropie right for me? Are there alternatives?:

I want to emulate the nintendo consoles, ps1 (and ps2 if it's possible), and maybe sega saturn. No need for any others.

Hi again,

keep in mind that the older Nintendo consoles work well (NES/SNES), the N64 is a bit slow on some games, but there is plenty of work on that.
But there are stoll complains.... See this post, there is plenty of info there:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3574/try-retropie-on-a-pc

You can do PS1 (i'm doing it as well), PS2 isn't possible on the RPi3.
Sega Saturn is another problematic system, it was a very powerful one, so the games won't run as fast as they should....

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/saturn

Greetings

HPK-de

@ubernub

You have to use KODI (the Mediacenter) for it....
Awesome program, it can be installed with the retropie-setup and will be started
from the ports section

ubernub

Ok I got to retropie setup from the menu in retropie. I don't see a ports section. Where is it?

HPK-de

@ubernub

manage packages -> optional packages -> KODI (scroll down till 330)

After installation KODI is found in Ports section

ubernub

You're my hero! <3

Now to figure out how to do the rest from here... XD I suppose I can install the rest from command line. :)

HPK-de

@ubernub

Yes. Kodi is really powerful, lots of plugins ;).
I'm using it for music, webradio, pictures, youtube etc.
You can even control it with tv remotes with a bit tweaking around :-)

Have fun with it

ubernub

Now how do I get Kodi to recognize my portable NTFS hard drive? It's not showing up in /media/ at all, though it does pop up a little message saying it's been inserted... Sorry for all the noob questions... Also, did it reboot to get to kodi or is it in the same OS still? And get Retropie to recognize it too since that's where all my games are...

HPK-de

@ubernub

Question: I don't know because i dont use NTFS HDDs. Someone else will know.
It is the same OS.
Explanation:
The OS you are running is "Rasbian" Linux, a fork of Debian Linux.
"Retropie" is running in Raspbian and is the "background", while "Emulationstation" is the
user interface (GUI) for all the emulators.
KODI is running as part of Retropie, started via Emulationstation.

There are special linux distributions out there just for KODI, but it works well in Retropie.

KODI has nothing to do with your games, if you exit KODI you are back in ES and everything is fine.

BuZz

@ubernub Did you use the RetroPie image or install RetroPie on top of existing OS ?

ubernub

@BuZz I used the retropie image.

BuZz

it should automatically mount in /media/usb0 then (unless usbromservice has been removed/disabled).

ubernub

@BuZz usbromservice is enabled. I'm not seeing any way to even browse to it in retropie. In Kodi there's a /media/usb0 but nothing in it. This thing really isn't very user friendly for absolute beginners :(

ntfs-3g is installed and functional, too but I can't for the life of me remember how to mount a usb SSD in linux manually.

BuZz

please unplug then re-plug in the hd, and then post the output (via ssh) of

dmesg | tail

For using ssh - https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/ssh

ubernub

@BuZz Thanks for you help so far. This finally feels like making progress!

pi@retropie:~ $ dmesg | tail
[ 3794.934517] usb-storage 1-1.5:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 3794.934888] scsi host5: usb-storage 1-1.5:1.0
[ 3795.932399] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Samsung Portable SSD T1 0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 3795.933759] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[ 3795.934070] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/466 GiB)
[ 3795.934583] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 3795.934603] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00
[ 3795.935578] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 3795.938631] sda: sda1
[ 3795.943017] sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk

BuZz

you can mount that disk manually with sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt (which will mount it to the /mnt folder) and unmount it with sudo umount /mnt - however to see why usbromservice isn't mounting it, please post the output from cat /var/log/syslog

BuZz

Please use a site like pastebin.com for the large log