Adding emulators without network

jan233

It's probably been asked a 100 times but I couldn't find the answer. Is it possible and how to do it? I'm on WPA-Enterprise Wi-Free having a hard time getting it to work.

backstander

@jan233
I've never tried connecting to WPA-Enterprise WiFi but maybe you'd have better luck using WICD. Here is more information about it:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Wifi/#wicd-curses

If you haven't already, you might also give that whole WiFi Docs a read through.
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Wifi/

You might also need to set it up manually:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Wifi/#manual-configuration-interfaces

jan233

So there is no way to import emulators without network then?

backstander

@jan233

So there is no way to import emulators without network then?

No easy way that I would recommend.

Now here is my sarcastic answer ;)

Well, it could be possible but it would be extremely tedious and time consuming. Basically you would need to manually do everything the install scripts does to install an emulator.

For example, let's just take the Dreamcast emulator Reicast. Here is the install script you would need to follow and do manually:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/scriptmodules/emulators/reicast.sh

First thing would be to make sure you had all the dependencies installed:

function depends_reicast() {
    getDepends libsdl1.2-dev python-dev python-pip alsa-oss python-setuptools libevdev-dev
    pip install evdev
}

Let just say you don't have libsdl1.2-dev. Well you'd need to download this package and install manually:
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/libsdl1.2-dev
But you see it also has dependencies that you need to make sure are installed...and then those dependencies have dependencies...and dependencies of dependencies have dependencies...and so on...and so forth...

Not only do you need to make sure you have these dependencies installed, but most of the times they need to be an exact version of that package (sometimes the newest version but sometime an old version).

Well to dependencies hell!
alt text

After about a couple weeks of making sure you had all the dependencies and their dependencies installed...then you could download either the pre-compiled binary (or source if no binary is available and compile it manually) of the emulator, which I think is located here for Reicast:
https://github.com/RetroPie/reicast-emulator

Last you would have to do some house keeping and manually add Reicast settings to the Runcommand's emulators.cfg, EmulationStation's es_systems.cfg, the directory structure, etc...
Here is some documentation about that:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Add-a-New-System-in-EmulationStation

And I've probably missed some steps....

I'm sure some awesome script programmer could write something to download the emulator and do the house keeping bit but the hard part would be the dependencies. For that you'd almost have to be online so the OS's package manager could verify everything is installed and all dependencies are satisfied.

Trailjacker

I know this isn't the answer you want, but as a workaround could you use a phone as a hotspot and then download the packages real fast? Compiling and installing manually is more of a headache than it's worth unless you just want to do it for a learning experience.

simonster

What about using a USB stick, would that work for you? Check out the documentation, in the Getting Started section there is a whole page on Transferring Roms: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Transferring-Roms/

EDIT: Sorry re-read your post, emulators, not roms.....never mind