Arcade 1up Raspberry Pi 3 RetroPie Image File Question

[ScottieMinds]

Hello guys,

I've done all steps reaching a point where I have Retropie installed on my Arcade1up cabinet. I also have the USB jump drive prepped to add roms, bios, etc...

I've seen many rom packs and I'm partial to Wolfanoz' 32GB Arcade Only torrent download. As I don't need all of the random console games, etc. I liked the Wolfanoz screen, layout and game options that are preloaded.

So, I downloaded the torrent and got 18 zip files (that are all the same size). I opted to extract from the first zip file and upon completion, it strings the first zip and all 17 remaining files into one disc image file.

First question: Do I write this image file to my preexisting SD card that has Retropie currently on it? That didn't make sense to me because I assumed it would overwrite Retropie, etc. Am I supposed to write the Wolfanoz image to a new SD card and put it in place of the current SD card (that has Retropie on it)? Doesn't any SD card NEED have to have Retropie on it in order to run on the Pi? Or does Wolf's image have Retropie preinstalled on it as well?

I'm trying to avoid downloading individual roms in the long accumulation process.

Also, does the Wolf image automatically add layouts, roms, etc as well once its inserted in to Pi?

I've searched and really haven't found a clear answer. There's plenty of tutorials about adding individual roms, etc.. but none that really touch on rom pack image installations.

...or am I doing this all wrong?

Thanks in advance guys.

[mitu]

@ScottieMinds said in Arcade 1up Raspberry Pi 3 RetroPie Image File Question:

...or am I doing this all wrong?

Yes, we don't support 3rd party images, especially the ones packed with ROMs - it's part of the ttps://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first page which you maybe should have consulted before posting this.
Use the image from retropie.org.uk/download.

[ScottieMinds]

@mitu My apologies. How about we eliminate the 3rd party aspect and focus on the process in general? Is that allowed?

[ScottieMinds]

@mitu I'm new to this whole process, but I'll revert to the page you mentioned. I'm somewhat confused because ETA prime uses your image initially, but then showcases the 3rd party layout you dismissed.

[BJRetro]

@ScottieMinds in general any retropie image is the only disk image for a particular sd card, if you re-image your stock card that you installed the official retropie image on with some other image (example either a image created by someone else or another image you have configured as a backup) it will completely overwrite it. One reason among others to consider in whether to use a image created by someone else is - are you ever going to want to reconfigure “anything” at all? The “hey everything works with no configuration” is only if you truly do not intend to configure or update anything ever. If you do, then suddenly (based on a lot of time I have spent reading these forums) something will go awry and most times no one can help you because the creators of the image may have hard coded configuration files a particular way that is very hard to undo. So you could always get another sd card, try the image or others or different configurations of official retropie image and can always overwrite it later if you don’t like it.

[BJRetro]

Also a couple of other things - I just took a look at ETA prime’s video on an arcade1up conversion; I don’t see him using a third party image, he is just using the official image it seems with the “showcase” theme which you can download from the Retropie official version. There are a lot of cool themes people have created for the official version. The other thing is that just because ETA prime does something doesn’t mean people here necessarily support it. The guy seems like a good guy and I have certainly watched his videos for help but ultimately he is a profit-making enterprise for YouTube views, ads, affiliate links, etc, and (I think at least) he is not an official part of the RetroPie Project in any way. Finally keep in mind as you go forward on working on your project that videos of any kind are necessarily snapshots in time - they can be helpful but they can also become quickly outdated as soon as retropie is updated.