Reduce boot-time?

reivaax

Hi, Sorry for my english. :s The reason of the long time of boot is the charging of the gamelist. If you have a lot of roms and you have scrap it (picture, informations, etc...). Recalbox charge this informations at the boot. It's why it's slower after scrapping games. The only solution you have it to delete the gamelist (and dont use the games descriptions...) Retroboy work for an different solution of the charging of the gamelist... But now, they have no solution... Games details = slow boot. they have no miracle solution... this charging is slow with raspberry and only 1gb of ram... :s

hans-brokking

Ok! Thanks for the tip! I have only the complete set off snes games scraped, but if it will boot faster then I will remove the scraped information.

nickdj

I have several thousand games on my Raspberry Pi 2 and I don't get any significant slowdown. All the roms are on the 64GB card and not externally. I manually scrape the games which obviously takes a long time and to make things a little quicker I only keep the games I'm likely to play in the main roms folder (e.g. snes) and put all the others in a sub-folder called '-Library-'. What could be useful is to see what is happening during boot. Maybe someone here can advise how to show the Verbose screen during startup?

hans-brokking

hey that is very intresting! If I understand you correct, you seperate your favorite roms from the rest. But how do you play one of those other games if you feel like it? Do you have to move it back to the original folder? Or is it possible from within EmulationStation to browse in differend folders?

reivaax

For information, with more users, we are creating gamelists full romset no intro for each machine. https://github.com/digitalLumberjack/recalbox-gamelists The idea being to offer with recalbox all descriptions without having to make a scrapping of roms for your roms no intro. This project will require a modification of emulationstation operation for loading GameList those who are very heavy. Keep in touch ;).

nickdj

The only reason why I create a sub-folder is for ease of use to be honest. I didn't want to be trawling through hundreds of roms to get to one I play frequently. If I want to play a rom in the folder called -Library- I simply select the folder and the games are listed. I put the dash in the folder name so it always appears at the top of the list which is sorted alphabetically. If I want the folder to be at the bottom I simply put in a character which is not supported (e.g. Library). I can move the files in and out of the sub-folder when needed. This is also quite useful when you would like to group a specific type or series of games. For example, with FinalBurnAlpha I have sub-folders called -Shoot em Up- and in the PC Engine folder I have put all the 'sounds' files in sub-folder. When scraping it searches sub folders so it works for me. I don't think the way I organize the roms makes any difference to the boot times. I think the speed of the memory card has more of an impact. There's a big difference between my class 10 and my class 4 when booting but I'm curious about why it would take 2 minutes for a Raspberry Pi to boot. The only thing I can think of is when the start-up has been modified to mount a remote share or USB storage? I hope you find this information useful.

hans-brokking

Hey Nickdj, I find your information very useful! I will make subfolders, I think i will keep my favorite roms in the main folder and all the rest in a subfolder. i was looking for such a solution, thanks for the tip. On the topic off boot-time: I have a Pi2 with an normal install of Recalbox on a Sandisk Extreme 32 GB class 10 card. Nothing on usb or anything like that. The only thing I have done after install is adding a lot off roms and I have scrapped the Snes roms. May I ask; you have also several thousands roms installed and scrapped more then me it sounds. From power-on till the sound starts, what is your boot-time? Mine is 2 minutes and 5 seconds. I really would like to scrape all my other roms, but not at the expence off adding more minutes... It kind off kills the buzz a bit for me, to play a quick game. (like Super Punch out for example

nickdj

I would say it takes about 10 seconds to boot my Raspberry Pi 2. I'm currently using a 64GB card but I have the same card as you in the 8GB version. Without PSX games you can still fit a few thousand roms and I would say it boots in the same amount of time as the 64GB. Whether I've scraped the games or not doesn't make any difference with boot times in my experience. If I was trying to resolve this issue the first thing I would do is backup all your roms, bios, and sauvegarde contents. If you are using Kodi install the 'Backup' addon and create a local backup of your settings. I would then wipe the SD card and format it fully. What I do is use 'MiniTool Partition Wizard Free' and delete all the partitions on the card before creating a new 'Primary' FAT32 partition. This ensures when you've written back the Recalbox files for install the partitions are realizable. In the 'os' folder I always delete the folder for the Raspberry Pi 1 only because it frees up space. I don't know if that has any effect on boot times. After this transfer back your files and see if it boots any quicker. You don't have to do this but it's where I would start if I was tackling this issue. Hope this helps.

hans-brokking

Ok! I will definitily try that! 10 seconds boot-time is amazing, i will also try other sdcards. Now that I know how fast it can be to boot into Recalbox I will not stop untill I get that! And now i will start the hunt for all other rom-scrapings. Thank you very much for thinking along with me!!

hans-brokking

Hey! One more question: Where does Recalbox save the scraped data? Can I backup those too? If I backup my roms,bios and savefiles and then format my card I must scrape snes again I'm afraid. And for future formats, when I want a fresh install, it would be nice if all scraped data could be backuped!

nickdj

It probably is possible but I'm not entirely sure how you'd backup and restore scraped data. An option to backup within Recalbox would be nice but I assume it means having USB storage or network share mounted. If you look at the path of the image of a scraped item it should tell you where it stores the information. I think it's something like /root/.emulationstation/download-* so I assume if you were to backup that folder then you could restore the scraped data? The way I would tackle this is to log into shell and copy the folder to the share so it's accessible via the network for backup. To restore you'd simply do the reverse. Might try to give it a go with the spare card. Just timed the startup and its probably closer to 15 - 20 seconds from switching on the Raspberry Pi.

hans-brokking

Hey, It worked! I managed to backup my snes scrapped data. You're advice was so helpfull! I had to learn quite a bit: SSH is new for me and I have never worked with Linux before, so all the commands are new. But I copied the snes folder to share and now I have backuped all covers. I also backuped the snes gamelist so that should be safe. After this weekend I will erase my sd card completely and see if I can get faster boot-times.

hans-brokking

Hi, I've completely formatted my card and did a fresh install. When I then inserted all Snes roms without the scraped data, the boot-time was 20 seconds! I then inserted all other roms I have and that seems to be too much... I have all mame, fba, fba libreto, snes, megadrive, nes, mastersytem and all gameboys complete. And that seems to be too much. The boot-time is again over 2 minutes. And I haven't even begun on scrapped data... I know these are a crazy ammount off numbers off roms and off course I don't need them all. The reason to have them playable is because I think it's fun when a friend is arround and he remembers a specific game from the past, is't nice to be able to play it directly. The only workable solution for me is now to make 2 sd-cards. One with everything on it to play with friends. And a smaller one with selected roms I play allot. If anybody has a better sollution I'm all ears!!