Just keep the hardware you have, and create an image on a clean SD as @mitu suggests, and you will have a proper retropie system, which will as you point out, will probably be more fun and reliable. Make sure your power supply is good enough though. Lots of people have issues with poor or under-powered ones. If you start getting a lightening flash on screen, you definitely have a power supply issue.

@rbaker Yes. They used my Pi with their set up and their set up no longer worked.

@Teeqla I was skimming the internet trying to do a project similar to yours and was wondering if you have had any success with the Linux Joystick Mapper and if you might be able to share it if you have?

@caver01 Again, great notes. Really appreciate the quick feedback! I'll get back to you on how this thing turns out!

@buzz thank you so much and I will read the forum advice

@retrocraze The manual method of using USB as ROM source should work.

I am looking into info-beamer's screenshot utility. While it does not support width and height it seems to have a better performance at larger resolutions.

Based on what I have read, it seems to support full "streaming" instead of just grabbing screenshots every few seconds, but I haven't figured that part out yet.

@milesacul yes

@urbandarkknight The Pi3 needs a 2.5A PSU anyways which even says in the link you posted and also there are some SD cards that doesn't work which you should let us know which one you have or showing us in a image because sometimes you could of bought a knock off card as well which does tend to be faulty and will not work.
If you want one that works great and all i would suggest getting this one cause i used that on my Pi (32gb version) for about a month till i ended up getting a SanDisk Ultra 64gb card (because all the games i own that i play on my Pi comes to 38gb) and normally for those errors it is usually the SD card and not the power source as for the power you would get a little lightning bolt icon on the top right hand corner letting you know that you're not using enough power.

@milesacul Sorry if this topic is becoming spam. Got some progress. If there is no defined install_bin_$id function, you use wget --spider -q "$__binary_url/${__mod_type[$idx]}/${__mod_id[$idx]}.tar.gz" to try to pull the binary. For now, I will check if the file exists with the same method and maybe work a better solution into RetroPie shell scripts afterward.

@meleu > But you wouldn't do such villainy, would you?
Only if the father is a really bad guy and his children are ramparts. But for all time: Peace and Harmony!

@sirhenrythe5th Keep in mind that all colour CRT picture tubes are driven by separate RGB signals going to the electron guns. TVs decode a composite signal into separate RGB signals before amplifying them and passing them onto the electron guns. Given the technology of 1970's TVs, it would be relatively easy to modify a TV to accept your own RGB signal rather than use the one it generates from a composite one.

Thanks again. Success so far.

I redid the mounting for the external hard drive and now have it mounted to the Retropie folder and it appears to work correctly. If I have the drive plugged in on boot, the emulators show up and games work. If I boot without the drive, only the Retropie menu comes up.

I did have to manually set up the BIOS, retropiemenu, roms, and splashscreens folders and subfolders up in the root of the hard drive through Windows. I assume that is normal in this case (and hopefully I did't miss anything).

I have a few more folder questions:

Is the BIOS folder set up in the same way as the rom folder in that there are subfolders for each emulator (such as psp, psx, sega32x) or do you just toss all the bios files in that folder? I see that the images by default are located in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images. Any suggestions on what to look at to store the images on the hard drive instead? Using Sselphs scraper perhaps?

Also, what triggers retropie to generate a new gamelist.xml? Is it when the scraper is run?

@jay81uk

Regarding your issue with the GBA BIOS, you may have to try a few before you find one that works. Also, the md5sum is noted here to compare against your own.

@AlexMurphy did you even try to use google first? Sheesh.

@itsnitro yea

@meleu Perfect, many thanks for this! Exactly what I was looking for. I always take routine backups.