@lenny yes works best with symlink. Probably you will lose samba access

@BreadPie said in Any alternatives to symlinks for organizing non-libretro savegames?:

I just get "Failed to create symbolic link" and "Operation not permitted"

That's because the filesystem ( the roms folder ) doesn't understand symlinks.

oh. i see

@mitu Alas, that wouldn’t solve my issue. I’d still be unable to symlink under FAT32. :/

@BuZz ... Can't believe I hadn't thought of that before. SHAME on me :-(

Thanks so much for your patience, this obviously did the trick. What I did is put that command in /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh, before emulationstation is called (otherwise the games didn't show up in ES because the USB wasn't yet properly mounted). It's still unclear to me why games can be accessed via symlink in ES, but the parser cannot access them. Oh well, the workaround works, and I hope future Googlers will find it easily. Phew!

Apart from the fact that they then appear in both menus (which is what you are aiming for anyway), it should be fine. Also, don't forget if the rom requires a parent or bios set (like the Neo Geo stuff), you will need to symlink these files too.

Yeah it would require some automation to make it more useful. Another issue I just thought of is it has issues with large datasets and takes a long time. So thousands of images might cause it to slow to a crawl.