Transferring thousands of Roms to the micro SD card

Libretro Lakka
#1

Hello, how are you. I hope you can help me with these (basic) questions.

I am using Lakka with a Raspberry Pi 3, and my PC has Win10 64bit. Both of them are conected to a Gigabit router via ethernet cable.

I want to add these complete No-Intro roms collections on my 32GB Class 10 micro SD card.

Atari - 7800 Atari - Jaguar Atari - ST Final Burn Alpha 0.2.97.38 GCE - Vectrex NEC - PC Engine - TurboGrafx 16 Nintendo - Nintendo ES Nintendo - Super Nintendo ES Sega - Master System - Mark III Sega - Mega Drive – Genesis

When I copied/pasted the small collections via network access (\lakka) to the folders I created inside the ROM folder everything went fine.

But when I started adding the big collections with thousands of roms, for example “Nintendo - Super Nintendo ES”, some times the saving of files completely stopped some seconds and then continued, and it was very slow so I finally stopped it (it saved some of them, then paused, then continued, and for example when this was happening if I wrote “ls” command on the RBPi3 console access, it took some seconds also to respond).

So finally my questions are (sorry for the long introduction):

  1. Is it possible in Lakka to use long name folders with spaces, for example: “\roms\ Nintendo - Super Nintendo ES” or I need to create short name folders? Like “roms\snes”

  2. In Lakka what is the maximum quantity of zipped roms that can be added on a roms folder?

  3. Can Lakka scans and recognize roms for a certain core in different folders (\roms\snes1, \roms\snes2…) or all of them have to be in just one folder?

  4. If the answer to the last question is yes… if I split each collections in several folders with less roms, for example 500 roms per folder, will this help to make faster the roms transfer from the PC to the SD card?

  5. If I finally could add the thousands of roms of the above collections, will this affect the performance of the menus, loading cores, etc.? Again, splitting the collections in more folders can help on this matter? Is there a limit of roms quantity to have a good performance in Lakka?

Thanks and best regards, Juan

#2

Hey

Im no expert but ive done alot of messing around with lakka and should be able to help, ive loaded a few thousand roms into lakka and havent had an issue… see my replies below

  1. Is it possible in Lakka to use long name folders with spaces, for example: “\roms\ Nintendo - Super Nintendo ES” or I need to create short name folders? Like “roms\snes”

i would recommend shorter names as some filesystems have issues with long file names and it gets confusing

  1. In Lakka what is the maximum quantity of zipped roms that can be added on a roms folder?

I dont think there is a limit, it might just take a long time to scan everything

  1. Can Lakka scans and recognize roms for a certain core in different folders (\roms\snes1, \roms\snes2…) or all of them have to be in just one folder?

you can have roms for the same emulator in different folders, the playlist should add them in with a relevant path

  1. If the answer to the last question is yes… if I split each collections in several folders with less roms, for example 500 roms per folder, will this help to make faster the roms transfer from the PC to the SD card?

im not sure splitting the roms into different folders would speed anything up, its all data that will be transferred… it depends on internet speed

  1. If I finally could add the thousands of roms of the above collections, will this affect the performance of the menus, loading cores, etc.? Again, splitting the collections in more folders can help on this matter? Is there a limit of roms quantity to have a good performance in Lakka?

depending on hardware it might slow down as the machine has to load all the thumbnails for the roms… assuming you’re using thumbnails

#3

Hi nate009! thanks for your answers.

When I have build my Lakka setup with these rom sets, I will post the results. Best regards! Juan

#4

Hi guys, to finish this story:

I transferred to my new micro SD Class 10 32GB card all the No-Intro roms of the above platforms, it took me about 2-3 hours.

The small collections where copied by copy/paste from Windows, and the larger ones (thousands of roms) using the excellent SFTP client from Bitvise: https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-client , this was my favorite method since you have more control and information to know what it is happening.

I scanned from Lakka menu the emulator’s roms folders one by one. One of the larger (FB Alpha) had about 4200 roms, and it took about 50 mins to be scanned (about 1.4 roms / sec).

When I was almost finishing scanning all the folders, the Raspberry Pi 3 became very hot and a green square appeared on the up-right screen corner, so I stopped for a while.

I saw that when I tried to access from the main menu the playlists of the emulators with thousands of roms, it hangs for about 0.5-1 second and then I could browse the games for this emulator. When I go to the emulators with less roms, this didn’t happen.

I started some games and they worked well, and I could test that Lakka can handle thousands of roms, great! Lakka rocks.

#5

An easier way would be to run a Linux and transfer at the rate of the SD write speed. Or find some way to get write access on that windows system for ext4.

#6

If you do decide to transfer to it over SMB transferring the rams in a single compressed archive and then decompressing it over ssh is much quicker than transferring thousands of small files.

#7

I meant in terms of plug the SD into a Linux computer (not a Pi) but that works too…