Retropie and Kodi

gomineko

Raspberry pi 4
Retropie version 4.7.1
Game Roms stored on external SSD
Movie files stored on USB pen drive

I recently added Kodi to my Retropie setup (under Ports), but I have encountered an issue and would be grateful for any guidance.

The first few times I started up Retropie after installing Kodi, all was fine. However, one time after I switched on the Rpi, it didn’t find any of my Roms and I ended up with only Retropie Setup, Scummvm and Favourites as options. All the Roms were still on the drive.

I unplugged the USB pen drive with the movies and then restarted the Rpi. All was fine. All the games were visible again. So, I turned off the Rpi, plugged the USB drive back in and then restarted. All fine.

However, a few days later, the same problem again. All the games disappeared.

Does anyone know what is causing this to happen and how to fix it? Is the Rpi getting the SSD and the USB pen drive confused somehow?

mitu

If you restart just EmulationStation (when the games don't show up), is the full list of systems present ?
The issue could be timing - the system is slow to mount both drives and when EmulationStation starts, the ROMs folder is not mounted and the systems are not populated. How are you mounting the ROMs external SSD ?

gomineko

@mitu

Thanks for the reply.

Next time it happens, I’ll see what happens if I restart EmulationStation.

The SSD was mounted using the Automatic Mounting method - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/

Sudden thought - all my movie files are just in separate folders on the root of the USB pen drive. Should I have them placed in a folder called something like “Kodi-Mount” (as the games are all in a folder called Retropie-Mount)?

mitu

@gomineko said in Retropie and Kodi:

The SSD was mounted using the Automatic Mounting method - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/

You may consider manually mounting the drive in the autostart.sh script, just before EmulationStation is started. This way the front-end doesn't get started before the SSD is accessible.

Sudden thought - all my movie files are just in separate folders on the root of the USB pen drive. Should I have them placed in a folder called something like “Kodi-Mount” (as the games are all in a folder called Retropie-Mount)?

That would not matter. The -mount folder is something created for the automatic mounting method in RetroPie, but it's not a standard for external media naming.

gomineko

@mitu

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll Google that at the weekend and see if I can work out how to do that. If you happen to have any links to hand for useful pages that would be super helpful.

mitu

Take a look at the Manual mount instructions for start. Read it, but don't execute anything from the first 3 steps, then look at the 4th part (Configure fstab to automatically mount USB drive).

You need 2 things from there:

the UUID of the disk (found with ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/).
the mount options.

Once you have them, you can disable the automatic USB roms service (step 1 of the manual mount method) and exit EmulationStation. Execute the command to attach/mount your SSD:

sudo mount -U <UUID> -o <OPTIONS> /home/pi/RetroPie/roms

<OPTIONS> is usually just nofail,user,uid=pi,gid=pi.

If you don't get any errors from the command, then start EmulationStation and check that every system shows up correctly and games work, etc.

The last step is to add the command to /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh, on a line before the emulationstation command runs. Reboot and check that your systems show up in EmulationStation.

gomineko

@mitu

You’re a star. Thank you very much.