Mostly great aside from a couple of emus + queries

stigzler

Seriously loving this on the xu4 and impressed with the performance. Big thanks for whoever's put this together.

I'm having a problem with a couple of emulators, though:

1) N64: Using the Emulator and Core set to Default (is this Mupen64+ or something?) - the start button doesn't work. Tried following
https://github.com/recalbox/recalbox-os/wiki/Configure-N64-controllers-(EN)
but puttying into batocera - it seems to not recognise a lot of commands..

2) PPSSPP games crash after you go past the first load screen - just goes back to main menu.

3) Query: I've set up Storage Device to be a 1TB USB Passport Drive. If I put roms into the roms folder in the Network>Recalbox>share>roms folder - do these go onto the emmc card or onto the 1tb drive? Also - any assets downloads/scrapes through recalbox or kodi - do these go onto the 1tb drive?

4) is the system 'locked down' in some way? When I putty in a lot of shell commands just don't work?

Many thanks + great work!

stigzler

Ignore the 1st one - for some reason, the start button started working...

nadenislamarre

stigzler 2) is fixed for the next release.

batocera uses 2 partitions :
- the boot partition, which is set to 1.2G
- the data partition which is by default the rest of the card, or by configuration an external usb key / disk drive.

the boot partition is mainly read only (some parameters, like the external disk information are stored here to be able to start on it)
All the rest you mention will be saved on the external disk.

4) which command doesn't work ?

Ma3ztro

nadenislamarre What is the format of the data partition (curiosity). I could not find any tool that would allow resizing it. I can work around that, but I'm mystified by the nature of this partition. 🙂

stigzler

Awesomeness! Thanks again!

All good news.

On 4) can't remember all the commands, but included ones like apt-get etc...

nadenislamarre

boot partition is fat32, data partition is ext4.
http://batocera-linux.xorhub.com/wiki/doku.php?id=en:batocera.linux_architecture

you can resize with gparted.
why to resize it ?

Ma3ztro

nadenislamarre My bad, I just realized the information was there (I read the page, but missed it!). Anyway, that was kind of just for the "challenge" of recovering some space from the 64 gb USB key for other general usage. I resized it with Gparted, but just realized that Windows 7 does not mount more than one partition from a USB key, so creating a second FAT32 partition after the ext4 ended up to be useless. I was a bit confused because Paragon Partition Manager states to handle ext4 partitions, but it could not resize the data partition (nor even stating it was an ext4!)...

Anyway, thanks for the reply!

nakotic007

Hi *,
I have an XU4 booting Batocera from EMMC card. (Thanks for supporting the XU4 btw! <3)
All ROMS are stored on an SD Card which has 64GB capacity, chosen correctly as "external" in system settings.
BUT on my share partition, fdisk reveals that there are just 34GB available... therefore I have to resize, but I cannot get GPARTED running.. how can I start gparted when booting Batocera? is it somehow possible?

THX!

nadenislamarre

i guess that you didn't use the official image of batocera.
you cannot run gparted from batocera, however, there are some linux distributions for that.
in the future, i ve in my todo list a task to increase the size when empty space is found.

nakotic007

nadenislamarre
I did use your XU4 image and set it on EMMC by Win32 Disk Imager. The 64GB SD Card is just prepared by Fat32 SDFORMATTER and mounted.. but not full size.

nadenislamarre

thuss, i guess that's the formatting tool that was limited.
you can expand the size from any computer, batocera accepts any size.

nakotic007

Duuuude.. what a mess here, after HOURS of investigating I found out that my USB micro sd card reader is not capable dealing with >32GB sd cards.. my standard sd card reader managed everything, so we are fine again 😃

Thanks for your attention my friend, I sent a small donation for your amazing work on batocera.

One last question: what format would you propose to use on my external sd card? I just store roms on it.
EXTFAT? EXT4? NTFS? any (dis)advantages?

nadenislamarre

ext4 (default for internal) : fastest, most robust but not natively supported by windows
NTFS : slow, not robust - possible data corruption if batocera is not well shutdown but natively supported by windows
EXTFAT : slow, not robust (no journalizing) - possible data corruption if batocera is not well shutdown

Jean

nadenislamarre
I know this is an old thread, but doesn’t ext4 have issues with some emulators? At least this is what the batocera wiki is saying

nadenislamarre

no. where do you see that in the wiki ?

Jean

nadenislamarre ops sorry I meant NTFS . I do have BTRFS on my internal hard drive installed which I use as batocera installation, I added an external hard drive just to store roms on it, but I am not able to format the external hard drive to BTRFS so it is on NTFS (I do connect the external hdd to windows sometimes), but I did read that NTFS can have issues with p3, wii u emulators and so on? Is that true?

And should I rather install ext4 than btrfs?

nadenislamarre

yes, true.
ntfs is really bad (but it has 30 years, not really adapted now). and as usual for microsoft : undocumented.
as a general rule, underlayers on windows are old and depracated, particularly file systems.
however, the main issue with wine (and emulators using it) is that it doesn’t support certain technical requirements, thus, it may work, but not always, and genarally, people have issues with it.
btrfs is the best fs for me on batocera (it is not by default for a technical issue in the image builder tool). and more over, there is a driver for it on windows. you can format from menu > developpers > format a disk on batocera.
ext4 is good too, but as stated by the dev of ext4 himself, btrfs is the next fs generation, the future. technically, it is more adapted to recent disks technologies and usages.

Jean

nadenislamarre thanks for your reply. I use BTRFS for my internal drive which runs the batocera installation, it works perfectly fine, but I am using an external hard drive in addition for rom storage and it is not possible to format this external hard drive with batocera, everytime I try to foram it (“format a disk”) nothing happens and the hard drive keeps being on NTFS. I don’t know how to solve this issue, I had the same issue before with my internal hard drive. If all my roms are on the external hard drive that I use as storage, the hard drive also need to be in BTRFS or ext4 right to be able to run everything without emulator issues? The batocera wiki says "Alternatively, you can skip having to access Batocera’s internal drive all together by instead commanding Batocera to use an external storage. Use an external drive for storage. The same limitations about filesystems still apply, but this is easier to reformat to another file system with." So which means since my external hdd is formated on NTFS and which has stored the roms I will run into issues with some of the emulators like ps3, wii u and so on. I wanna avoid this, but the problem is I can’t format the hdd in BTRFS in batocera. What can I do here? I don’t think there is a program or software on windows that allows you to format a hard drive in BTRFS?

EDIT: I finally managed to format the external hdd under batocera. I had to connect the hdd to my pc, then format it to exfat then connecting it again to batocera and from there I was finally able to format it to BTRFS. I don’t know if this is a bug or not, it is the second time I run into to this, but you can not format a disk under batocera if the current filesystem of the hard drive you wanna format is on NTFS.