@simpleethat Well, my suggestion is to compress all of your roms into zip or 7z format (as the emulators support) for use on your Pi and to just store them in that format on your NAS. This way they are maximally usable on your Pi should you need to copy them back over. The amount of extra compression you can get by compressing everything into giant 7z files is fairly small in most cases. There are some roms that can't really be compressed for use by emulators, mostly bin and ISOs. However, most of the emulators also support a compressed format for these types of file (chd, pbp, etc). All the time, effort, and electricity you spend compressing files to eek out a few GB of storage space just isn't worth it.

I've saw a method to make a Linux Virtual Machine and try to reduce the filesysystem as shown in this video: I'm going to give it a try today, couldn't get any luck with 7Zip as I'm trying to write it onto a new card.

@mitu That could work... I still want to know if there is a way to use a dvd-rom. Obviously one double sided 9GB dvd won't hold all of my games, so I'll have multiple. Besides, it wouldn't matter if I can't add more because I'll use the other ones. If this doesn't work, I'll go to your idea. Thanks!

where do the gamelists go? After a leading a hard but virtuous life, I hope they go to heaven.

@Xenos I'm using an USB SSD for my roms. It makes it very easy to just unplug it and plug it into my desktop pc to manage roms or images/videos, especially if moving many or big files around, which tends to be very slow over my WLAN connection to the Pi in my DIY upright arcade cabinet.

@classicgmr So the stick has been 100% RELIABLE. it does get pretty warm but nothing crazy, I can grab it with my hand( my right hand not my left hand) and say " ooohh that's warm", but it never heats up enough to cook my imaginary girlfriend pancakes. It's a solid drive for a Low Profile drive which is perfect for this portable gaming system. No worries in the heat department unles every degree counts, and then maybe ou should do some research. What I did dislike was while it was PERFECT for my setup profile-wise, the transfer speeds are poor. I have a Kingston HyperX from two or more years back that performs the same as a modern 3.0 hard drive. 100MB/s either way. Not mbs, MB/s. So this drive wasn't great n the transferring category. If I had everything set, and didn't use it as an experimenting USB drive, it would have been fine. Basically, It's awesome for the look, and I am keeping it as my travel drive, as I am replacing it with a higher performace PC compatible drive but it does perfect for only needing rare updates. Just my 2 cents and I wanted to update the thread.

Thanks for the recommendations guys. I have decided to go with the 128gb Samsung.

@herb_fargus https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/ Would I be able to edit things in folders that are currently denied because of permissions using this method? I'm still not very happy that I can't edit the NstDatabase.xml file for Nestopia or all of the hoops you have to jump through to change control configurations. Would be nice if this method was a workaround for that.

sweetness thanks for the answer

@TMNTturtlguy - Thanks for your comments! I feel a little better now. Many of the people here who did suffer corruptions were able to diagnose it to a specific cause (losing power; bad power supply; overclocking; etc). @Neuromante - No offense intended by the "obsessed with finding the best way of doing something" comment; I actually meant that as a compliment. As in, users like you are playing a higher stakes game of poker and pushing the envelope of what is possible with this inexpensive little computer, and then relaying that information back to more novice users like me. So, thanks! Interesting project idea with the game saves/cloud thing, also! For purposes of simply backing up the ROM files, I do plan on keeping an uncompressed list of ROMS on a HDD or flash drive that mirrors the one in my ROMs folder on the Pi. Obviously, this would be contained within a full microSD card image, also, but I'd like to have the collection ready to go in case I need to start over (like with a new operating system or different device).

I have 160 now across atari2600, gb, gba, gbc, nes, snes, and arcade. And I think I need to stop adding new ones. But I can see how that will never happen. ;) Some games I will literally never play like some of the atari2600 ones but they are there for the nostalgia and for my kids to see so they can experience the games I grew up with.

I just checked what I'm using and I've got 10.2GB worth of ROMs loaded onto a 16GB SD card, so I'm missing 5.8GB. I understand that part of this is for RetroPie and all the emulators, but surely this does not require that much space. Thoughts anyone?

Nuke them? Heh, are you secretively running an underground 0day box lol. You can enable root and connect to the Pi trough your PC via an FTP browser such as FlashFXP, you can immediately browse trough all dirs remove files etc.

Thanks all, I got it all working on my new 128GB card! Joel

@enderandrew This isn't necessarily the case because some USB 2.0 flash drives are a lot slower than what the USB 2.0 standard allows in my experience. With A USB 3.0 flash drive, you will likely see performance much closer to the maximum USB 2.0 is capable of on the Pi as they are built for speed. I bought a low-profile USB 3.0 drive for this reason and in my case, throughput did not disappoint.

@Flipcrazy You can use as many as you want. Just follow my guide here But beware this is not the officially supported way of doing it. @dankcushions