Creation of a custom RetroPie image.

[windg]

Hello everyone.

I want to build a RetroPie image, similar to the one that is available for download, but with the settings and emulators that i'm using.

I want to do this to avoid installation of the Os , installing/downloading the emulators and then backing up the image with win32diskimager. I've never done this before, so if anyone has a guide to get me started experimenting I'd be grateful, thanks.

[mitu]

The RetroPIe images are created using the image scriptmodule, with the entry point being create_image defined here. Note that it's quite resource intensive and you'll need to run it with the appropriate parameters.

However, you cannot avoid downloading the OS and installing/downloading the emulators (how else would the image be created ?) and the installer still runs the basic installation - which may not include the emulators you want or exclude the one you don't want. In addition to that, there's no possibility to add your own custom configs, though you can probably hack the install scripts to run some file copy before creating the image

What's the problem with doing a basic install over an empty image, then backing it up ? You can probably modify the image to be shrinked and to trigger the partition resize on first run (like the RetroPie image does it) so in this respect would be identical to a RetroPie image.

[windg]

@mitu Thanks for the reply!. My problem is that i am creating backups often (every few weeks)and i was searching for a faster and more efficient way to create backups, as clean as possible, but my expectations was wrong. I will try to shrink the image. For now, the only thing i am doing is to zipped the 32gb raw image.

[mitu]

@windg If you intend to use the image as a backup (i.e. restore your settings/images/roms/etc.), then using a pristine/installation image is not what you need.
If your intention is to minimize the space used, then zipping the image would still be the preferred method - shrinking would be useful if you want to restore to a different (size) sdcard/USB stick and the sizes don't match.

[Ashpool]

@windg I am well aware of the time it takes, and that this may not be the answer you wanted: But instead of compressing an image of the systems state you wanted/had setup just with <archiver of choice>, how about creating an image via dd (yeah, that takes it time) and then using pishrink to scale it down to its actual used space size and it also has advantage that most probably it can be written back to any SD card of a size > the pishrinked image ones, and that really is something I've learned to appreciate ;].

P.S.: I've also used Win32DiscImager in the past (+5years ago), but because of pishrink I switched to the Linux-Chain dd-pishrink... even if all guides/how-to's I've found in the past mentioned that pishrink also shrinks images with a (sector.by.sector) based full image from Win32DiscImager, it always failed in my trials... and the benefit of shrinking the image with pishrink was well worth to do the backup on a real *nix system or even just within a VM setup for that purpose.

[windg]

@Ashpool I was aware about pishrink but always i was afraid to use it. I will give it a shot, thank you very much!