Retroarch via Rom Collection Browser in Kodi on Libreelec

sylvafeyth · December 9, 2017 at 1:28 PM

Hello everyone and sorry for asking a bunch of dumb questions in here but I can't seem to find these answers anywhere and I'm certainly not a 'nix guru.

As the title states - except I have a few problems:

1. I can't even locate Retroarch's fully qualified path to the file it runs in order to point Retroarch to it.

2. I don't know what parameters to pass on to Retroarch from RCB. (I believe I need to include the path to the core in addition to some other switches?)

Retroarch runs the game fine standalone, but RCB's interface / autoscraping is so nice. Please halp!

Running latest version of libreelec on RPI3

sylvafeyth · December 9, 2017 at 8:36 PM

Bump... Please?

Mario77 · December 10, 2017 at 12:37 AM

Never tried Rom Collection browser but I assume it's setup similar to Advanced Emulator Launcher

When in first run setup

1) choose weather you want to scrape online or have assets locally

2) choose platform (let's say you'r setting up nes roms)

3)Path to nes emulator - browse to /storage/.kodi/addons/game.retroarch/addon.sh

4)Emulator parameters would be the coreID,launcherID,RomID ...I use fceumm "%rom%" for nes

5) path to nes is path to your roms folder

6)file mask is your roms extension ..for nes would be nes,zip

7)nes artwork just browse to your assets folder where you have your artwork or where you want the scraped artwork to be saved..

That should be it..

Mario77 · December 10, 2017 at 3:28 PM

Which version of Retroarch are you using?Is it from Gamestarter Repo?

Metabee · December 31, 2017 at 11:25 AM

Hi there, I just took a few days to make it work myself,

Many of the tutorials online will tell you to use the addon.retroarch/rom.sh script to run the games.

After some hassle and work, I will tell you how I got it working on LibreELEC v 8.2.2 (Generic) and RetroArch addon from retrolib v. 8.169.7.

I assume you already installed the retroLib repository to kodi and now want to run the games via commandline.

When you create a new Collection for the Rom Collection Browser, we want to select the Retroarch executables as the emulator with a specific paramater stating it where to find the Core it should run with the emulator for the ROM.

From a Command line we can test this (you can ssh into the device and run the command to test that this would work) as follows:

Code

/storage/.kodi/addons/game.retroarch/game.retroarch-Gen -L /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/game.retroarch/cores/[Name of the Core we want to load] [Location and Name of the ROM]

So the first thing we want to do is enable hidden folders so we can point Rom Collector Browser to the game.retroarch-Gen file (If you are running the Arm/RPi version of LibreELEC, you will probably want to run game.retroarch-RPi, don't know, I haven't tried it.)

This can done in settings, Media, General and enable "Show hidden files and directories"

Then when Rom Collector browser requests for the Emulator, select the binary in the directory /storage/.kodi/addons/game.retroarch/game.retroarch-Gen

For the paramaters for the launcher we will have to manually input the location of the .so file, unless someone can give me a better way.

-L /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/game.retroarch/cores/[Name of the Core we want to load] "%ROM%"

The name of the core will be divided by the collection, so ensure that for the SNES collection you are loading the snes9x_retrolib.so core etc.

Good luck and good gaming!

Mario77 · January 2, 2018 at 1:27 PM

Or try AEL (Advanced Emulator Launcher)Tested or Rpi and works good and you can add any games to your skin anywhere,favourites etc..Still needs retroarch to launch games and exits Kodi with every game change...If you want to stay on retroarch without having to go back to AEL to change game you can scrape assets from retroarch itself and build game librarys and playlists but those wont show up in kodi..