Running ROMs from a Network Share

JFamily

@jpxdude I'm glad it helped! Completely agree with adding some network functionality. On my other Pi, running Kodi, I can go into the settings and point directly to //192.168.1.10/Storage/Media and voila, no mounting or anything. The first time you select the path, it asks for a username/password, you put it in and it remembers it for any other path that uses the same IP/Hostname. That would be the most optimal setup in my opinion. The configuration is so much simpler.

I'm still having some issues saving, really thought I had it worked out. My wife and I worked through the first act in super mario world for the 800th time last night. Went back in after we were done and no saved game... Maybe I missed something. I can definitely save and reload states though... Not sure what's going on, maybe a typo somewhere...

jpxdude

@JFamily Are you saving using a particular emulator? Tried doing the same thing in other emulators, or an alternative SNES emu within RetroPie? I've not tested this yet, but maybe I'll try later tonight if I have time!!

Shakz

@JFamily
You will have to mount the drive in Linux otherwise it will never let you write to it.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently
Once the drive is mounted you will need to go into linux cmd line and chmod it so its writable.
sudo chmod -R 777 <path to mounted drive>
You should then be able to write your save games to the drive. Had the same issue with my setup.

JFamily

@Shakz
It is mounted in Linux. I was just talking about how Kodi works and how I would like RetroPie to work. Strangely, that Pi can save to the drive (When I download subtitles, they save next to the video) without any chmod'ing.
At any rate, both of my save paths are now set to ~/RetroPie-Save. A local folder, completely separate from the mounted drive. I'll definitely try your suggestion by chmod'ing the mounted drive and the RetroPie-Save folder just in case.

@jpxdude
I'm using the default SNES emulator which was saving just fine before I moved to network shares. If @Shakz's tip doesn't do anything, I'll experiment with other emulators. I'm pretty sure he has our solution though.

When I first started playing with it, I thought it might have something to do with the fact that Root owns the mounted drive but of course made no progress in chown'ing the drive to pi:pi

jpxdude

@JFamily I guess that I can't currently save anything to the NAS. I have tried saving states which do not work, and if I try to shutdown RetroPie, I get an error that appears as follows:

lvl0: Error saving gamelist.xml to ""/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/fba/gamelist.xml"" (for system fba)!
lvl0: Error saving gamelist.xml to ""/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gba/gamelist.xml"" (for system gba)!
lvl0: Error saving gamelist.xml to ""/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/gbc/gamelist.xml"" (for system gbc)!

I'll try reapplying permissions, however when I tried @Shakz method, I used:
sudo chmod -R 777 RetroPie

and it didn't seem to make a difference.

Shakz

@jpxdude interesting....your gamelists are not saved to /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/<system>?

jpxdude

@Shakz Yes, I have no idea why this is!

jpxdude

OK, so I have it half working, which is weird...

I unmounted my existing share using:

sudo umount -a

Then: sudo nano /etc/fstab

Edited my one line to:

//192.168.0.18/Share/RetroPie /home/pi/RetroPie cifs username=user,password=pass,uid=1000,gid=1000,nounix,noserverino,rw,user,exec 0 0

Save then remount using: sudo mount -a

Now it lets me save normally in a game (tried with SNES) and also save/load states (tested in both SNES and lr-fba-next), however it is crashing on exiting/restarting emulation and shutting down.

Feel like I'm half way there now! Any ideas?

-J

JFamily

@jpxdude I might be having the same problem but I haven't put much thought to it. Whenever I tell ES to close or tell the Pi to restart from within ES, it just goes to a black screen. I can switch terminals, log in and sudo reboot if I have a keyboard plugged in. I've just started loading PuTTy and sudo reboot'ing from there.

This didn't happen in my first image with this setup. I thought it might be related to the release I pulled down because I'm manually installing RetroPie which is why I didn't put a lot of thought to it. But if it's happening to you on 3.8.1 then back to the drawing board...

Edit: Now that I'm getting a better grasp on all the steps required, I might re-image again and see what happens. Hopefully I can refine the process a bit. This is how my relationship with the Pi's (and linux in general) goes. Experiment, experiment, reinstall, experiment, reinstall, experiment, reinstall, EVERYTHING WORKS, enjoy and never touch it again.

You should see the looks I get when I mention reimaging the MediaPi to try something different out!

Shakz

@JFamily If you added a buncha roms on the network drive when you shutdown the pi emulation station will do a write to all the gamelist files. This will take quite a while if you have a ton of games on the network drive. Which if you are like me....you do.
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/FAQ#why-does-shut-down-and-reboot-take-ages

JFamily

@Shakz Ah, again another facepalm. I knew that :( -- So basically, according the the document, either deal with it or no updated play counts... Not favorable but play counts aren't really that important to me.

jpxdude

What @Shakz says seems to make sense! I'm not interested in meta data so will probably turn this off. I'm in the process of scraping which appears to be working but is equally incredibly slow!

Edit - just to update, I've turned off the saving of metadata on exit and everything is pretty much now working fine! The only weird thing left is a lack of splash screen, which fails to load on startup, otherwise, everything else works...regular game saves work as well as saving state. I'd also like to scrape faster than use the built in ES scraper, otherwise RetroPie itself is working pretty well so far!

Thanks for your help @Shakz and @JFamily it is much appreciated!!

Shakz

@JFamily Well honestly I don't often shut down my pi. No reason to really. It manages power at an idle state just fine and even with 1000s of games on it; it still really only takes a min or so to shutdown...just gotta be patient.

doncastermems

Can't someone do a step by step for this I want to run rooms from my pc the info here doesn't make any sense to normal ppl

vxjester

@doncastermems
I'll take a shot at it.
Step 1: sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old
Step 2: sudo nano /etc/fstab
Step 3: add at the bottom of everything that is there //server/share /pathto/mountpoint cifs credentials=/home/username/.smbcredentials,uid=shareuser 0 0
Example: //192.168.1.1/share/roms /home/pi/RetroPie cifs credentials=/home/pi/.smbcredentials,uid=pi 0 0
Step 4: Press ctrl+o then enter to save.
Step 5: Press ctrl+x to exit.
Step 6: next sudo nano ~/.smbcredentials
Step 7: Add your network drive info to this in this format (you might not need the domain part):
username=shareuser
password=sharepassword
domain=domain_or_workgroupname
Step 8: Save and exit just like before in step 4 and 5.
Step 9: sudo mount -a
Step 10: sudo chown RetroPie: /home/pi/RetroPie
Note might need to sudo chmod 0600 ~/.smbcredentials
Then sudo mount -a
Then ls ~/RetroPie
This is to check if you done everything correctly.

doncastermems

ok thanks so much ill have a go, so im guessing the blue bit is the bit i edit with my share path details the rest of line i leave as it is ?

theres a space between /roms and /home should that be there ?

vxjester

@doncastermems
Yes there is a space in between /roms and /home because it the end of the directory path and the beginning of another. See what you are telling the pi is you want it to point to your network drive as part of the pi's filesystem. To answer your first question yes the blue is what you want to edit for where ever you have for your network.

doncastermems

Ok so I'm almost there got the Roms showing and loading from pc but no retropie menu ? I've only copied my Roms folder to the PC should I have copied anything else from the sd card in the pi to the PC folder

BuZz

@vxjester said in Running ROMs from a Network Share:

@doncastermems
Yes there is a space in between /roms and /home because it the end of the directory path and the beginning of another. See what you are telling the pi is you want it to point to your network drive as part of the pi's filesystem. To answer your first question yes the blue is what you want to edit for where ever you have for your network.

You should use markdown (click on the compose ? at the top right when editing a message) to format your post, and it will be easier to follow.

eg this is a inline preformatted block surrounded by a single backtick

#!/bin/bash
# and this is a code block using three backticks ```

I did an example edit on your message but it could do with some more formatting imho.

peer1979

I'm trying to seperate the Retropie folder with all my roms and saves from my retropie installation and access them through a samba share. Although i'm now able to play games from that share, i've got issues with my savegames. It seems to be a right issue, i can't get it right (pun intented).

What i've tried: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-Network-Share
I've also checked: http://electricgardener.net/retropie-moving-games-usb-stick and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently.

I'm a novice when it comes to linux.

My setup:

Pi 1

openelec
usb harddrive mounted (NTFS) and accesible throught media/Media/
Retropie pi map in media/Media/Games/Retropie
Rights folder Retropie/saves: drwxrwxrwx
Rights of files in folder Retropie/saves: -rw-r--r--
relevant part of samba.conf

[Media]
path = /media/Media
available = yes
browsable = yes
public = yes
writable = yes

Pi 2

retropie
content off /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh

sudo mount -t cifs -o user=root,password=openelec,uid=1000,gid=1000 //168.1.100/Media/Games/RetroPie /home/pi/RetroPie
emulationstation #auto

My suspisions

I think this is a rights issue, because i can play the games from the share. When i try to change the rights in the saves folder it does
not work or present any error. Nothing happens. Perhaps it has something to do with NTFS?