Stream Playstation games over network to Retroarch.

General
#1

I have been having some success with ripping my PS2 games to a network share on an old Mac Pro and streaming them to my soft modded PS2 using Open PS2 Loader. This has allowed me to archive the physical discs into storage and free up some space. However it means I still have to have the original hardware connected up to a spare TV. Unfortunately this is an LCD device and the images are just about passable. I also have a lot of PS1 games which are taking up shelf space and I would like to archive those discs as well as the console. I have been attempting to run them through Popstarter on the PS2 but this appears to be more trouble than it’s worth. While I would normally prefer to play games on the original hardware, I just don’t have enough space for all of them.

I have used Retroarch in the past and I believe the level of emulation is just about on a level with the original hardware. It would also allow me to run a filter to make the image quality better on the LCD. Whilst I appreciate that it would be easy for me to just use the Mac OS version of Retroarch (which I do intend to setup), I am wondering if there is an easy way to run the Windows version on my main PC and stream the games from the network shared drive? I would hope this would also allow me to access it on my laptop if I need to be in a different room. All devices are on a wired network.

Thanks in advance.

#2

I don’t have much experience with sharing drives on windows, let alone from a mac to a PC, but I would imagine that you could set up a Samba share on the Mac and then mount a network drive on the PC using that Samba share, and then retroarch should be able to see the network drive like any other drive, and you could load the ISOs from there.

If anyone has more experience doing this sorta thing, or knows that I am horribly mistaken, please correct me.

#3

Are you wanting to run RetroArch on the remote PC and stream the video to your local machine? If so, you can use Nvidia’s GameStream(?) or Steam’s streaming.

#4

You may be able to use filzilla Google it if fit for purpose then problem solved it gives you an ip address and u use ftp n filzilla to send files from a to b via an ip address that shows up on screen when yo open the two programs also look up home brew apps for file sharing also samba shares sounds workable just need to log into modem and setup shares

#5

Man, Popstarter is a little tricky to make it work, but it worth the time. I have 3 PS2s (one for each TV) all slim, with OPL and running games, both PS1 and PS2, from LAN. With shared lan virtual memory card. There’s no emulator as good as this, even if popstarter isn’t perfect.

Forget RA for this, I had lots of troubles when playing over network. At first it runs fine, but it’ll stop working and it’ll annoy you.

#6

Hi guys. Thanks for replying so quickly.

@hunter No I want to store game images on my Mac Pro and play them through Retroarch on my Windows PC. I believe it is possible but I am struggling to get the shared drive to show up as a selectable asset in Retroarch.

@Noj I’ve used Filezilla to transfer files to my PS2 via FTP but again that’s not really what I’m trying to do here. When I first set up FMCB on the PS2 I stored my game images on the internal HDD in the PS2 so used Filezilla then but I found out I could store them on a share instead and play them over a LAN connection. This was working really well when it was being run through my Windows PC. However this machine is also a Plex server and trying to run both at the same time was causing system lockups, crashes and poor streaming quality so I moved the PS2SMB folder to an unused Mac Pro. It was a little more difficult to set up as Mac OS doesn’t have Samba installed natively any more so I have to run a program called SMBUp to install and start the service on boot up, however this is also now working well.

@brunobelo I’ve been trying for weeks to get Popstarter working but all the Wikis and guides I’m looking at are not helpful at all. They’re either completely out of date of very confusing to read through. I’m using OPL 1065 and apparently I don’t need to create individual ELF files for each of my PS1 VCDs any more. However the same guide that says that then goes on to point to a folder were it says “POPS folder where VCDs and their ELFs will be stored” which just confuses me. I have all the Popstarter files including Pops_IOX.pak (I think that’s what it’s called but I’m at work just now and can’t check). I’ve created various POPS folders, POPSTARTER folders and placed files all over the place so it’s a real mess now. I’ve edited the IPCONFIG.DAT and SMBCONFIG.DAT files with my network details. No matter what I try I just can’t get the PS1 games to show up in OPL. What version of OPL are you running and would you be able to provide a basic step by step guide detailing exactly how you got your set up working so I don’t have to look at conflicting information? There seems to be 2 specific websites dealing with this topic and it appears that some of the devs have had an argument or don’t like each other any more so won’t give advice on each other’s software. I’m not even sure if 1065 is the official version or if I should be using an earlier version from a different site.

Anyway, I don’t want this topic to become all about OPL as it’s a Retroarch forum so as I currently have a PS1, PS2, PS3, Dreamcast, Xbox 360 and respective games taking up space at my desk I thought it would be easier to rip all my games to HDD and use Retroarch to emulate the games over the network however I may just end up using RA for MacOS and play games from the local Mac HDD instead.

#7

Oh yeah, if you have SMB set up, just share the directory through it and then go over to the Windows PC and make sure the directory is mounted to a drive letter and then when you go to ‘load content’, that drive letter should show up in the list of locations (it won’t be the drive name, like “Typhoon-rawmz” or whatever, it’ll be the drive letter like M:). Then, you just load stuff through it as if it were local. Easy peasy.