Emulation

    I've recovered a 120GB SSD from a dead PC and thought about putting it to use as a boot drive for LibreELEC on my RPi4.

    Due to the extra storage space I'd also like to use it to hold some emulators, is this possible?

    Have no experience with emulation in Kodi.

    There was a fork (LibreELEC-RR) a few months ago. Unfortunately the dev stopped working on it.

    But you can install Kodi within RetroPi. Maybe you want to check this out?

    LE has lots of binary emulators available although the Kodi GUI doesn't do the greatest job of helping users understand which ones work ok or best on any given piece of hardware (an RPi4 will not handle everything). If you do a little research things run fine from LE.

    I'm looking to mainly run 8-bit stuff with the odd 16-bit title so nothing too taxing.

    I've checked the Wiki & couldn't see any info on emulators.

    Kodi documentation on emulators is similarly lacking. I've installed https://github.com/zach-morris/plugin.program.iagl and when I select e.g. a SNES ROM Kodi will ask which emulator to use for playback, and if not selecting one that's already present it will install one from the LE add-on repo and then things just play. There is no "Library" for games but I save regular ROMs as favourites and access them direct from there. I also have IAGL configured to cache ROM files to avoid repeat downloads and give faster starts. Other distros like Lakka, RetroPi, Batocera will be more poilished for gameplay and less polished for media. LE is more optimised for media, but the game stuff does work.

    LibreElec has never given me an issue and I want to keep it as streamlined as possible for playing media as the Pi will get much more use for that than gaming.

    I tried setting up a dual boot on the SSD.

    The story so far:

    Used PINN to setup Retropie & LibreElec but the SSD wouldn't boot even though I formatted it as Fat32.

    I updated the Pi Bootloader eeprom & Firmware on the Pi & tried again to boot the SSD but nothing.

    Next step is to try PINN on an SD card and see if that works.

    Quote from chewitt

    If you're primarily going to use LE, perhaps make a little effort to understand Games in Kodi.

    See https://kodi.wiki/view/Games

    I will, thank you for the link.

    Before I start adding items though I need to put LibreELEC on a larger SD card and here is my next issue.

    I've 2x 32GB SD cards that I can use so that I leave my original SD 16GB alone in case of user error.

    I've tried writing a new LibreELEC image to them but both fail. Each in the past has had something for the Pi on them so have 2 partitions.

    I've tried SD formatter & balanaEtcher but no joy writing to the SD cards.

    Any help appreciated.

    This is getting frustrating, I cannot get either of my SD cards to format.

    I've checked and each SD has had a version of LibreELEC on it with a 512mb partition and a 29.51GB partition.

    I've tried:

    Raspberry Pi Imager 1.7.5

    BalenaEtcher Portable 1.18.11

    None could write the LibreELEC image.

    SD Card Formatter 5.0.2 Cannot format either card.

    Are you formatting these cards in Linux.

    Windows is a bit stupid and doesn't understand removable media with multiple partitions. Write this 'image' to the card and it will overwrite the MBR partition table; erasing knowledge of the partitions. Windows will then see the SD card as a normal unformatted drive again:

    bootsector.img
    Shared with Dropbox
    www.dropbox.com

    NB: The LE USB/SD creator app has this "image" listed under the Tools download section.

    Thank you for the info.

    I tried that image in Raspberry Pi Imager, LibreELEC USB-SD Creator and BalenaEtcher.

    None could format either SD card, I think they are both duff.

    I've also tried Diskpart & putting them in my camera which has worked on multi partition SD cards before.

    I'll order a couple more SD cards, what size /brand would you recommend for LibreELEC & games?

    I don't have access to a 2nd laptop to put Linux on but I do have a 2nd card reader, tried that and still no joy.

    The only Linux based computer I have is a pocket PC, I put Gparted on that and tried a few things but still no joy.

    Unless anything else can be suggested I'll call it quits and order a couple more cards.

    As before what size / speed / brand would people recommend for LibreELEC and a some emulation stuff?

    Quote from ian_j

    I don't have access to a 2nd laptop to put Linux on but I do have a 2nd card reader, tried that and still no joy.

    The only Linux based computer I have is a pocket PC, I put Gparted on that and tried a few things but still no joy.

    Unless anything else can be suggested I'll call it quits and order a couple more cards.

    As before what size / speed / brand would people recommend for LibreELEC and a some emulation stuff?

    Personally and for obvious reasons I wouldn’t recommend any brand. What I do use is Sandisk Class 10 16gb. Always felt the fakers targeted the higher capacity cards. So far no problems. I literally just use it for the OS. External storage for everything else.