Newbie question about ROMs on SD card

[estephan500]

Hi all. I have set up RetroPie, and it runs nicely, but it's on a fairly small SD card, I think 8GB. Then I went and downloaded the whole MAME rom set 0.78, which is a little over 32GB.

I wanted to use the USB memory stick method to get the ROMs into the game. So I took a 32GB memory stick, had retropie create the right folder structure on it, and put all the 4000 or so ROMs into the correct locations on the memory stick. Then, as directed, I put it into the pie.

*** Here is where my dumbness is exposed. All along, I thought that the USB memory stick method was great because you basically played the games right from their locations on the memory stick. But now I see that Retropie automatically copied only 44 of those games to the roms folder on the SD card! I am guessing that it's only 44 because the small SD just ran out of space.

My questions:

1-- Is it impossible to have the pie simply play the roms directly from their location on the USB memory stick? or am I truly only able to play the games when the roms have been relocated onto the SD card?

2-- if the answer is that they have to be on the SD then that obviously means I should totally rebuild my Retropie on a huge SD, like 32gb... can the Raspberry Pi take larger, like 64? I have a Pi 2.

giant thanks. I have gotten good info from the good documentation, but to be honest ... is there a stronger, traditional documentation other than the pretty short ones on the retropie.uk site? I guess the Wiki is the place huh...

Thanks for help -- Eric

[dankcushions]

the documentation is fairly thorough. did you follow this guide? https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive

[estephan500]

Hi. Ooooh, OK. Right there in front of me. I think if I saw that headline before, I saw the words ROMs and flash drive and thought it was more discussion of the process I had already done. Sorry for that, thanks very much! We'll see what questions come up next... --Eric