Add a Toggle for MicroSD or USB

Charco

I currently have a Pi 3 running RetroPie 3.7 and a 64gb microSD card with all my roms. I was looking at changing over to a 128gb USB drive in case of a corrupt card and from what I can see the loading device can only by changed by digging into the code. I am sure I could do this, but I would prefer if it were possible to choose your rom location/default device from the RetroPie menu. Could this be possible in a future update?

Tomazed

not sure if thats what you want but from the command line, I've linked the usb dongle where I have a roms subfolder.

$> ln -sf /media/usb/roms /home/pi/Retropie/roms

note thate the previous command will replace your roms folder in Retropie by a link to USB so Save everything before doing it

pablo

I agree with @Charco that there should be either:

a - an option to choose where your roms are saved, or
b - by default letting the Pi know that a flashdrive plugged in with a specific directory structure should be recognised as a valid source to load roms from for the emulators

Drakaen391

if you talking strictly Roms, then you could add a script to do an if/else....

But it would only run at the start...

If your talking the operating system swapping on corrupt, then not possible with how the pi is designed

wetriner

I looked into this concept some, but had a couple problems. The way that I tried, was a usb device selector in usbromservice.sh that would throw a couple short scripts with the device UUID into /etc/usbmount/mount.d and /etc/usbmount/umount.d/. So any time the usb device with the matching UUID was plugged in it would be mount --bind to the roms directory. It worked alright for vfat, but ntfs gave me problems.

Since it's filesystem stuff, there's a lot of ways to accomplish it. It seems like if it's done in the right way it could be useful. But I think it could potentially cause a lot of problems for users. I also think that a solution with options to not only have sd or usb, but both in emulationstation, would really be the ideal. Another thing to consider is whether or not the scraper will work properly.

One of my thoughts was a script that would generate a modified version(to override, but not overwrite) of es_systems.cfg with the paths changed and potentially the entries duplicated. So you could have the SD card directory for NES and a USB directory for NES both showing up in emulationstation, or one or the other.

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/1130