Accessing roms directly from SMB share?

[liquiddivide]

I have the idea of hosting my roms on an SMB share on my NAS so that save game files and such are all synchronized across multiple computers. I’ve modified the es_systems.cfg file to point to the correct paths for the roms, but whenever I try to run the rom, I get an error that the rom failed to load. I’ve tried running a super nintendo rom using snes9x-rpi from the shell and it fails to launch the rom too.

I don’t really want to copy the rom files to the pi, as this defeats the whole synching idea. Is there a way to get this working?

[lolerzz]

I’ll bump this thread because it needs to be solved. I have 32gb SD card and it’s nearly full so I think about expanding space by fileserver.

[liquiddivide]

After some more testing, this only appears to be a problem with the snes emulator. I tried nes and ps1 over the network and they both worked fine.

[samuelellis]

I have this working sucesfully – it is a bit of a bodge though

All i did was delete the contents of /home/pi/RetroPie/roms so it was utterly empty after copying the directory structure to a folder on my server

Then i opened the fstab and added the following line

//servername/share/subfolder /home/pi/RetroPie/roms cifs username=,password= 0 0

This has mapped the server share/subfolder to the Roms directory so the RetroPie install does not think anything is changed, it takes a bit longer to boot but im planning on leaving it on as much as possible and once i have finished testing i will be setting it up so no logon credentials are in the fstab folder (this was a quick dirty test to see if it was possible)

[liquiddivide]

This is pretty much what I did short of clearing out the directory and mounting to that location. I mounted the share elsewhere and changed the path for the system in es_system.cfg. This appears to have worked for all systems but Super Nintendo. Nes is fine and playstation 1 is fine. I haven’t tested any others. Can you confirm that your solution works with snes files?

[samuelellis]

yes SNES games work fine

A word of warning though if you run the scraper to pull game details when it has finished browsing your games is frustratingly slow so if you are going to run over the network dont have scraped game data – Also to help speed up navigation i would reccomend under the emulators directory you have folders 0-9 a-c etc etc and put your ROMS into the respective folders

[liquiddivide]

Alright. I’ll try this, but I don’t understand why it would work to mount the share in one location but not another. Separating the roms into separate folders sounds like a good idea. I planned on keeping the scraped data locally on the pi. As long as the images are small, it should still work without much slowdown in browsing.

[liquiddivide]

This solution did not work for me. I’m still unable to load any snes roms from the mounted share.

[masterfulmethods]

Anyone have an update on this?

Do savestates/memory cards/save files/etc all stay in correct locations when running over network shares?

Has anyone tried scraping the data for all roms, then moving the directories to a network share? (or is scraped data not stored in the the emulator/rom directories?)

@liquiddivide – did you get SNES roms working for your setup?

[Author]

Posts