RetroNAS

Does it, or can it, produce a log so that if everything falls apart at least it can be reconstructed ??

00001 filesevensix2.five - filesev2.003
00002 file ......

Or a script to "undo" by pulling the log and re-renaming from it


Edit - I din't say thanks for the work. Very rude of me.

 

It can, and it probably should. Good call.

 

I'm mid way through writing a ROM import tool that copies from a "romimport" folder into the "roms" folder (and the correct game location).

Similar things could be done with the above, changing the "mv" to a "cp" so that there's no damage done to the source files.

User can then delete the contents of the import folder at a later date if it suits them.

 

Oh yer. Or what he said Pierre32

 

The scenario I envision for this is where the user has already got their ROMS distributed in the RetroNAS master structure, and can run a function to make the appropriate systems available to their EtherDFS share too. Files would first be copied over with their original names, then renamed in the new location. The script would handle all the paths, keeping things pretty safe.

Certainly wouldn't want users randomly calling the script from the wrong location in the terminal, like I did.

 

I think i had a little too much spare time.... All this talk about retronas running on any old bit of hardware seems to be true to my great amusement.. Grabbed the oldest thing setup that would boot from a cd, installed debian, and retronas with smb, etherdfs, ps3netsrv, ssh, telnet and NFS, and it works! (very slowly). Contemplating replacing whatever coppermine cpu is in it with a p2-266 to see how much slower it would run, as it's not like i have a million other projects i could be spending time on

 

^ As it happens I dusted off an original Pi B last night and set up a fresh card... but I might save that for the intended project.

This afternoon I've taken a look at what people might emulate in DOS. This looks like a pretty good summary. Based on that I decided on these folders under /<dos share>/roms:

Spoiler

2600
gb
gba
gbc
nes
snes
odyssey
vectrex
arcadia
pc88
pcfx
mac
mame
msx
c64
zx81
zxspec
cpc

So I held my beer, and dumped this into the terminal:

Spoiler

mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/2600
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gb
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gba
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gbc
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/mame
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/nes
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/snes
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/odyssey
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/vectrex
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/arcadia
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/pc88
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/pcfx
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/mac
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/msx
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/c64
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/zx81
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/zxspec
mkdir /media/pi/FAT32/roms/cpc

cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/atari/2600/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/2600
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nintendo/gameboy/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gb
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nintendo/gameboyadvance/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gba
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nintendo/gameboycolor/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gbc
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nintendo/nes/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/nes
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nintendo/snes/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/snes
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/other/magnavox_odyssey/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/odyssey
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/other/vectrex/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/vectrex
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/other/emerson_arcadia2001/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/arcadia
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nec/pc88/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/pc88
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/nec/pcfx/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/pcfx
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/apple/macintosh/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/mac
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/microsoft/msx/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/msx
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/commodore/commodore64/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/c64
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/sinclair/zx81/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/zx81
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/sinclair/zxspectrum/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/zxspec
cp /media/pi/ntfs/roms/amstrad/cpc/*.* /media/pi/FAT32/roms/cpc

cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/2600
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gb
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gba
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/gbc
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/nes
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/snes
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/odyssey
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/vectrex
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/arcadia
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/pc88
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/pcfx
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/mac
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/msx
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/c64
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/zx81
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/zxspec
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /media/pi/FAT32/roms/cpc
/opt/dosrom/rename.sh
cd /home/pi/

No problems. Many of my source folders are empty, in which case the process just throws an error and moves on. Note that I haven't included MAME in the transfer, as you want to source a separate set for DOS, not copy the later ones.

There are zero smarts for checking content in the destination folders. If you run it a second time for some reason, you'll end up with duplicates of anything existing. Mildly interesting is that it continues the number sequence, but the latest additions aren't the higher numbers. Check the timestamps. (That killed my idea of just culling the ones with the later timestamp. But it's quicker just to delete the lot and run the script again anyway).

 

This is my whole career in a single line of text.

Well done!

This is cool. Mind if I share it around?

 

Ha go for it , i'm fairly sure i got the idea from one of your posts somewhere.

 

What's the current CPU spec?

(Love the hostname too)

 

600mhz p3, 256mb ram, 16gb sd2ide drive.

Warning at the start of the debian installer about low memory, i had to select which installer modules to load, but apart from that it was no different to any other setup

 

Running off an old SD card is truly painful, the CPU is fine and the memory is enough to run a few things (though if you load too much stuff up it'll fall over in terms of performance or hang if you're not using swap). This tutorial seems reasonable for doing an initial install onto SD card, then moving it to a USB drive and having the boot process start from SD and continue from USB, but I haven't tried it.

Nifty! Another idea: you can mount a VFAT partition in Linux as "msdos" rather than "vfat", where the former only supports 8.3 filenames:

Code:

root@retronas:~# mount -t vfat -o uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022 /dev/vdb /data/retronas/dos
root@retronas:~# cd /data/retronas/dos/
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# echo "asdf" > asdfasdfa
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# echo "fdsafdsa" > asdfasdfb
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# ls -ltr
[...]
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         5 Feb  3 18:48 asdfasdfa
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         9 Feb  3 18:48 asdfasdfb
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# cd
root@retronas:~# umount /data/retronas/dos/
root@retronas:~# mount -t msdos -o uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022 /dev/vdb /data/retronas/dos
root@retronas:~# cd /data/retronas/dos
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# ls -ltr
[...]
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         5 Feb  3 18:48 asdfas~1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         9 Feb  3 18:48 asdfas~2
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# echo "asdf" > asdfasdfa
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# echo "fdsafdsa" > asdfasdfb
root@retronas:/data/retronas/dos# ls -ltr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         5 Feb  3 18:48 asdfas~1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         9 Feb  3 18:48 asdfas~2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi         9 Feb  3 18:55 asdfasdf    # <- overwritten by second command while FS is mounted as "msdos"

 

Today I learned. That's going in the wiki.

 

So if I copied long filenames to an msdos-vfat partition, they would automatically truncate?

 

The annoying bit compared to the rename script would be remounting the filesystem: you need to copy the long file names onto the partition mounted as "vfat" to preserve their long name, otherwise names that collide will overwrite each other. But once you've done that, you can remount as "msdos" and it will intelligently generate short file names.

 

Any chance this would ever run on OSX?

 

Gotcha Good info. Speaking generally, running a mount like that would take a lot of the nasty surprises out of EtherDFS transfers. Love having a large transfer fail because you accidentally left one of GOG's Windows files in a folder. Those files would be welcome to eat each other on the initial transfer to the VFAT volume. I'll try it out in the future.

 

A Linux VM would be your best bet on a modern Mac.

 

Just saw this post where someone is on Discord from their Apple IIe:
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattl...ord_yes_the_internet_chat_service_for_gamers/

And learned about BitlBee:
https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html
https://wiki.bitlbee.org/

One for the ideas page maybe?

 

Right now, as is, no.

All the internal parts are open source, however. They're all available in something like Homebrew, and you can steal all my configuration from my GitHub.

But otherwise, as mentioned, a Debian 11 VM is the answer. On Mac M1 you can run the native Debian 11 ARM64 port in a VM.