Setup RetroFE with Retropie X86

[drmechxico]

So, I've been gone for a while and I was messing around with Raspberry Pi3 and Attractmode. I still don't like attractmode.
I got my hands on a tiny X86 Machine and installed Linux mint 18. (ubuntu is too heavy for this thing)
I got things working by installing Retropie X86. Can anyone show me how to setup the libretro cores to work with RetroFE?

Or if there is an easier way to setup retroarch and RetroFE on linux, let me know.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

You should be able to simply compile RetroFE from source on that machine; if you run into any trouble, just let me know.

I don't use RetroArch myself; I use MAME in stead, so I can't help you there I'm afraid. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out the launcher configurations though.

[drmechxico]

I compiled RetroFE, I was just looking to use retroarch and the cores to work with it. Hopefully I can figure it out.

Thanks Pieter!

[Pieter Hulshoff]

In general, step 1 is to get it to work from the command line. From there it's an easy step to the launcher conf.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

[MisterB]

You might want to take a look at the Pi3 image thread.  If you use the x86 version of RetroPie on this device, you can use the RetroFE install script that I have posted there.  I did my development of that script on RetroPie Ubuntu, so it should work fine on your setup.

That script creates all the launchers needed for the RetroPie systems, and uses the same RunCommand script as RetroPie to invoke the emulators.  As such, it will use RetroArch cores where configured.

[drmechxico]

You might want to take a look at the Pi3 image thread.  If you use the x86 version of RetroPie on this device, you can use the RetroFE install script that I have read I have posted there.  I did my development of that script on RetroPie Ubuntu, so it should work fine on your setup.

That script creates all the launchers needed for the RetroPie systems, and uses the same RunCommand script as RetroPie to invoke the emulators.  As such, it will use RetroArch cores where configured.

You saved me so much time by doing this. So, when i create a collection, I could just keep the locations of all the artwork or change them to match the retropie image correct? That and point it to the right launcher.

e.g.
retropie/roms/*

[MisterB]

I set things up so that the ROMs stay in the standard RetroPie location, but all of the RetroFE collection assets (artwork, videos, metadata) remain separate from the rest of RetroPie in their own collection directories.  So if you want to use RetroPie artwork assets, you would need to change the collection settings.conf file to point to the right EmulationStation media directories.  That choice was intentional - the ES scraped artwork assets tend to be garbage.  With this setup, you can download the preconfigured RetroFE collection assets from EmuMovies, copy them into the RetroFE collection folders, and just rename the collections to match the RetroPie system naming standard.  You may need to make some tweaks to the collection settings files though, to point to the right system metadata.  You can refer back to the 'genesis' collection that is created during the install process for a configuration example.

Here are the places to look at for setting things up...

If you enable the Samba shares via retropie-setup, then you can use the following shares over the network:
ROMs: roms/<system name>
Collections: configs/all/retrofe/collections/<system name>

The corresponding local paths are:
ROMs: ~/RetroPie/roms/<system name>
Collections: /opt/retropie/supplementary/retrofe/collections/<system name>

[drmechxico]

I put the roms in the retropie/roms folder. I put all of the assets in their respective folders. I am getting a blank list and no video playback.
Everything working fine with attractmode though...

[MisterB]

Can you send along a copy of your RetroFE log.txt file?  Should be in the RetroFE config directory.  Let's see if there is anything obvious there.