Roms on a NAS

[The Papaw]

16 minutes ago, PaulyC said:

@The Papaw Hi bud,  how are you accessing yours roms via launchbox?  Have you just shared a folder then mapped it to a drive from the NAS and edited your .xmls to point your game to that mapped drive?

I have all mine almost set up now. I went with unraid in the end and am just waiting for the parity drive to finish building then a can transfer it over and mass edit my .xmls lol

Yes Sir, I mapped the shared folder in Windows, in my example I made the mapped drive "Y". Then I made a copy of my xml files, (just made a copy of the ..\Data\Platforms folder in case of mistakes ). I used Notepad++ to find and replace the portion of the path.. In the shared folder, just have a folder names Roms, then a folder for each platform within that, then drop the games into their respective folder

Here is a copy of my Atari 7800 xml so you can take a peek at it:

Atari 7800.xml

Edited February 15, 2023 by The Papaw

[Baggio]

38 minutes ago, The Papaw said:

Yes Sir, I mapped the shared folder in Windows, in my example I made the mapped drive "Y". Then I made a copy of my xml files, (just made a copy of the ..\Data\Platforms folder in case of mistakes ). I used Notepad++ to find and replace the portion of the path.. In the shared folder, just have a folder names Roms, then a folder for each platform within that, then drop the games into their respective folder

Here is a copy of my Atari 7800 xml so you can take a peek at it:

Atari 7800.xml 318.36 kB · 0 downloads

Brilliant, thats just as I thought so nice and easy

I’ll check that xml out when I get home as well, thanks

[Tanoshimi]

Yes, I've had great luck with installing all of my ROMS and even emulators on a NAS mapped to a G:\ (for Games) drive in Windows.  And once BB was installed, I could run it from anywhere. 

But I'm still working out how to get AAA games (installed directly in Windows, or Steam or Epic) to exist only on the NAS drive, and not need to be manually installed on each computer in my network.

[The Papaw]

1 minute ago, Tanoshimi said:

Yes, I've had great luck with installing all of my ROMS and even emulators on a NAS mapped to a G:\ (for Games) drive in Windows.  And once BB was installed, I could run it from anywhere. 

But I'm still working out how to get AAA games (installed directly in Windows, or Steam or Epic) to exist only on the NAS drive, and not need to be manually installed on each computer in my network.

If you can run a VM on your NAS or something like that, you may be able to do something with it. The biggest issue that kept me from looking into it more was if you have multiple users and game saves being over written by another user. With most of the emulators that can be easily done with a little research.

[Tanoshimi]

38 minutes ago, The Papaw said:

If you can run a VM on your NAS or something like that, you may be able to do something with it. The biggest issue that kept me from looking into it more was if you have multiple users and game saves being over written by another user. With most of the emulators that can be easily done with a little research.

I did start looking into creating a single VM and running it on all machines.  Couldn't get it to work right.  The VM stored on the NAS could be opened by each machine, but when I did the changes didn't replicate.  It was like they started off as the same machine, but diverged from there.  I think they were using different Virtual Hard Drives.  But if I could get the VHD right, and IF a VM/VHD could be opened by multiple machines at the same time, then I'd have a one-and-done solution.  Of course, no idea how collisions would be handled, like multiple game saves, or two PCs accessing the same file at the same time.

[Baggio]

@The Papaw Me again lol.  I have the NAS setup now and it works great.    I have hit a snag though, do you play any standlone games off your NAS?  I never thought of this before and was only thinking about running emulators off the main PC but ive realised i have games like my touchscreen quiz games, probably eXoDOS and the newer arcade games that run with jconfig ect so am not sure how to get around this.   

I know we can use a VM but thats not a option for me so wondered if you know anyway around it?

[The Papaw]

2 hours ago, PaulyC said:

@The Papaw Me again lol.  I have the NAS setup now and it works great.    I have hit a snag though, do you play any standlone games off your NAS?  I never thought of this before and was only thinking about running emulators off the main PC but ive realised i have games like my touchscreen quiz games, probably eXoDOS and the newer arcade games that run with jconfig ect so am not sure how to get around this.   

I know we can use a VM but thats not a option for me so wondered if you know anyway around it?

By "Stand Alone" are you meaning like PC games, games that need installed? No

Touchscreen Quiz Games (not sure what you mean about these) About the only thing I have that are touch screen are games like fruit machines that I use the MFME emulator to play and Yes, I do have those on the NAS, but I use an actual touch screen PC (or other PC's using a mouse) for those. Not sure about the newer arcade game you are referring too, sorry

 

[Baggio]

21 minutes ago, The Papaw said:

By "Stand Alone" are you meaning like PC games, games that need installed? No

Touchscreen Quiz Games (not sure what you mean about these) About the only thing I have that are touch screen are games like fruit machines that I use the MFME emulator to play and Yes, I do have those on the NAS, but I use an actual touch screen PC (or other PC's using a mouse) for those. Not sure about the newer arcade game you are referring too, sorry

 

No not games that need to be installed,  just games have thier own folder and have a .exe to run them.

By touchscreen quizes i mean these that we get in pubs.  You can edit the game so you can use a mouse to play them.

But i think i have solved it tbh.   I just created a symlink of that folder from the NAS and put in in the folder it used to be in on the main PC and it worked great!   Hopefully thats the case for everything else.

Edited February 17, 2023 by PaulyC

[thefritz11]

On 12/17/2021 at 11:23 AM, The Papaw said:

Not sure if it is of any help, but I run most everything from a NAS. I have a old Dell PC (started with a RPi3 I think), installed OMV5 (it's free) on it. I have a 14TB external HDD attached to it for roms and a 2TB external HDD attached for the media. (I have other drives attached for other things as well, like a MediaSonic Pro Raid that hosts all my video, music and such, another 12TB in raid 5) and I use the internal drives I have installed in the PC for backups.

I have LB/BB and all my emulators installed a primary desktop PC, then I use Syncthings to send it to all the other devices (I exclude some of the setting files in BB (especially the cache files) and emulator config files. That way no one writes over others game saves and settings. Works great for me. If I want to update LB/BB or an emulator, I just make a copy of the folder before I update it so I can go back if something goes wrong. What's cool about it, when I update LB or an emulator on the main PC, it updates it on all the PCs. 

I don't use anything wifi on the gaming side and the speeds are as always like any other external drive. Just some other ideas that may be helpful.

 

This is a zombie thread but do you happen to have handy the files you did NOT sync over from emulator and/or big box settings? Trying to figure out best way to get this all synced up. 

[The Papaw]

1 hour ago, thefritz11 said:

This is a zombie thread but do you happen to have handy the files you did NOT sync over from emulator and/or big box settings? Trying to figure out best way to get this all synced up. 

Not exactly sure what you're asking here. I still use a NAS for ALL roms, even from Mame/Arcade all the way to PS3 using RPCS3. Most of your emulators will run fine with rom on a mapped drive except for RPCS3, it's a bit trickier.

If you're referring to SyncThing, you just have to remember to exclude the save data location of each emulator so folks don't start over writing each others saved games

[thefritz11]

39 minutes ago, The Papaw said:

Not exactly sure what you're asking here. I still use a NAS for ALL roms, even from Mame/Arcade all the way to PS3 using RPCS3. Most of your emulators will run fine with rom on a mapped drive except for RPCS3, it's a bit trickier.

If you're referring to SyncThing, you just have to remember to exclude the save data location of each emulator so folks don't start over writing each others saved games

Yeah with Syncthing I am the only user really so not worried about saves overwriting but wondering what if any settings I should avoid syncing?

[The Papaw]

If you're the only user, I would sync the entire folder then

[Baggio]

Digging this up again and was wondering what everyone’s experiences are with the new Linux based games on  over a NAS?  
 

Every other emulator and even non-Linux based game on TP work great, it’s just the newer Linux based games which play fine but take a really long time to load.

I was thinking of hardlinking them but it doesn’t look like you can do that on different filesystems and while you can softlink, there is no point doing that.

Anyone have any ideas on a way around this?

[Baggio]

Right, so I figured out a way around it and it's the same way I get eXoDOS to load up quickly.

Basically, just symlink all the games folders to your local drive and copy a couple of real folders/files over so it reads them off the local drive and not hundreds, possibly thousands of tiny files over the NAS.

For Linux based TP games, it's the prod, programs and snd folders in the data folder if they have them.   I've only tested a couple so far though so if anyone needs this kind of info let me know and I'll share it when I'm done 

And For anyone that has this issue with eXoDOS, you just need the util folder and its contents on your local drive (with the whole ExoDOS folder symlinked) as that has thousands of the config files in and you'll launch exoDOS games from your symlinked setup on your local drive.