What size microSD card is required?

jack21

Is 8 GB sufficient? Using RPi 3.

chubsta

it really depends on what games you want - 8gb will get you a basic install of the games you will probably play, although very few, whereas 256gb will get you every game under the sun including cd-based ones, it is really down to what you will play.

Best thing to do is get the roms for the games you want and base the sd card on that, although i wouldn't imagine much less than 32gb will be suitable, which isn't a problem as they are so cheap.

DarkWolf

There are 2 ways I already have done and tested:

Use a larger micro-sd card:

8gb is basic install with 3gb free space)
32gb fits round about 10000 roms (not huge ones like mame/ps)
larger than 32gb depends on the amount of games you want

Use a usb stick as storage (I really recommend that):
Use a 8gb to 16gb sd-card and a usb stick with the size you want.
(My setup: 16gb sd-card with 64gb usb stick)
Also the setup is very easy! create a folder called "retropie-mount" on your usb stick and plug it into the pi and restart. RetroPie will automaticly mount it to /home/pi/RetroPie and will also copy everything of this folder to your usb stick!
More details here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive

Eldrethor

The size that you need really depends entirely on what systems you're interested in and how big you want your collection to be.

In terms of systems, the size of the roms tend to grow with each new generation, so if you're running an Atari 2600, where a game is considered large if it reaches 4 KB in size, then 8 GB is way more than enough storage. But if you're packing PSX or Sega CD games, especially multi-disc games that are well over 1 GB in size, you will want your card to be large enough to accommodate that.

Then you also have to consider how big you want your collection to be. Do you want only specific titles or are you building large libraries, and for how many systems?

To get an idea of what you'll need, look at the roms for the systems that you want, and check out their file sizes. From there, you can get a feel for how much space you'd need for yourself. Personally, I think 32 GB is a good starting point; at that size, it gives you plenty of space to work with across most of the cartridge-based systems, with some wiggle room for CD-based games. That and a card of that size really isn't very expensive, but if you do plan on adding a significant number of CD-based games, then you should bump that up to 64 GB.

careisaacbowman

Yes, for Raspberry Pi 3, the minimum SD card size should be 8GB while the recommended and directly compatible maximum Pi 3 SD Card is 32GB. However, any SD card format the SDXC card for use with NOOBS.

Alturis

@jack21 said in What size microSD card is required?:

Is 8 GB sufficient? Using RPi 3.

Honestly I never have had any interest in having every game under the sun installed at all. I have been running an 8 gig card and have just about every game I can really think of that I care about fitting on it.

I did just buy a 64 gig card, though, just because its not expensive and I figured I could stop worrying about keeping the quality of video previews low etc.

The freedom is worth the 20 bucks or so.

But 8 gigs is plenty if you want to hand pick which games you care to have installed.

moonston333

An 8gb card is enough as u only need to burn a basic 2gb retropie image onto it then just use an external hdd for the games.

My set up is 16gb sd card with basic retropie image on. And it's only got my game list config and all cover art

And a 1tb external drive with 30 thousand games on perfect setup

cyperghost

My setup is a underrated 4GB Kingston class 4 card with RetroPie on it
Still 1.5GB are free. ROMs are symlinked to 16GB USB storage with BGM, movies ... on it.

Still 6GB are available. Space eaters are the PSX and PSP images ... but I think the @Alturis way is right. Make a selection...

Except the Arcades ;) There a full ROMset is better because of our MAME ROWs

moonston333

@cyperghost yes it is good to have a selected set of games but if u want the full retro setup put them all on an external hdd. My set up has 1500 psx games and 30 thousand other romset and works perfect

cyperghost

@moonston333 I have no problems with full sets :) But you will never get deeper in game experience because of surplus on ROMs (IMHO!)

Therefore I like this forums because of game recommendation and game selections.

jonnykesh

@cyperghost @moonston333 I'll have to agree with cyper here. 30,000 plus ROMs is pointless overkill (again, imho) How may of those games are playable? How many are actually worth playing? How many will you actually play, even once? How many will you enjoy rather than flitting between them?
I totally "get" people who are completists but if you were to play each of those games for 15 minutes at a time it would take over a year of continuous play to get through them!

Alturis

@jonnykesh Not to mention all the pointless wasted hours just scrolling through your list. ;)

jonnykesh

@alturis I have about 2000 and that is too many. I maybe play 50 of those.

moonston333

@jonnykesh this is not a complete romset for all. I no where ur coming from if it were complete there would be 60 to 80k games. My 30 thousand games are all games that I like and played for the last 30 years on their original consoles. I have played all 9f these games and all of them work that's y there's only 30k but obviously n64 games don't work too good.
So this is my list all games work fine from amiga upto psx

BillyH

@Alturis @jonnykesh @moonston333
I haven't counted but I've only put around a hundred ROMs on there, at this point I just checked my actual game collection and downloaded all ROMs for those games.

I could get more games but I still expect that already much of what I've put on my Pi will end up going unplayed, especially once Nintendo starts putting VC games on the Switch.

Thousands of ROMs on my Pi just sounds like an insane amount to me, of course there will be fans of this approach but it's definitely not for me.

Alturis

I have 160 now across atari2600, gb, gba, gbc, nes, snes, and arcade. And I think I need to stop adding new ones. But I can see how that will never happen. ;)

Some games I will literally never play like some of the atari2600 ones but they are there for the nostalgia and for my kids to see so they can experience the games I grew up with.