A few questions before diving...

[gerpy]

I have a spare RPi3 and wonder : why not a Retrogaming+Kodi box ? Out-of-the-box running is important to me because I have no time to tweak (but I can if I have to). So I'm thinking of Recalbox. I'd like to emulate the gaming platforms of my youth :

• Atari 2600
• Various arcade games (typically from the Invaders to the StreetFighter II' period)
• Commodore 64 (first coding here )
• Super NES
• Amiga 500 plus
• Playstation I

Q1 : am I at the right place and does Recalbox suport all these ? ... or do I need to bother with Retropie ?

In addition, I'm a (heavy) Plex user and I'd like to enjoy my libraries with the Recalbox RPi.

Q2 : does the included Kodi permit to use the PlexKodiConnect plugin, or at least the "official" PlexForKodi

More importabtly, I'm lost in the ROM jungle. For Atari, Amiga, C64 and stuff, I guess that Usenet will be my friend (just used to search a bit and it actually seams easy to find ROM packs)

Q3 : but what about Arcade ? With latest Recalbox install, which ROM pack should I look for ?

[voljega]

@gerpy Everything is there except C64 and Amiga but they will likely be there before the end of the year

For arcade there is a full documentation in the wiki, the needed romset wil change with the release of 4.1

For Plex I don't know I'm not using Kodi

[gerpy]

Thanks a lot for the answer. So I'll wait for the Commodore stuff. There's no rush. With 4.1, which romsets should I download for Arcade ? ... and when should it be released, even in Beta ?

PS : I've actually read the wiki (basics as well as avanced, in french actually) but I find it hard to understand. I think that I'll download a MAME.78 and see what's going on. It is the FBA_libretro vs MAME which is more obscure to me, especially wrt to the libretro romsets I can find, but which always relate to MAME... ;( I guess that I need to improve on that point

[voljega]

@gerpy fba_libretro simply uses a mame romset but a more recent one. Just see it as two emulators capable of executing the same roms....

fba_libretro is compatible with more arcade game than mame but as performances issue with some of themon raspberry pi

If you want to try most of the games you'll need them both

The romset for next release 4.1 fba libretro is 0.2.97.39

[RustyMG]

C64 has been removed from 4.1 beta and Amiga has been in limbo now for, hmmm, a year easily, along with bezels, so no offence meant to anyone, but I personally think you may need to look to "the dark side" depending on how urgent your need is, as I can't see either coming anytime soon, certainly not before 4.2 in my opinion.

The cd32 emulator installation detailed elsewhere however allows you to play hundreds of Amiga games in the meantime. I have about 80 standalone games plus about 5 compilation iso's that have hundreds of games on each, and there is no messing with disk swapping etc.
I can confirm it works on 4.01 and 4.1 beta.

[voljega]

@rustymg please don't spek like that if you're not contributing

[RustyMG]

Sorry but I am only expressing an opinion.
Nothing more.
Someone is asking specifically about the stage the c64 and Amiga is at.
And the answer is, no further forward than last summer.
I suggested IF he REALLY needs / wants these specific emu's, he may be best looking at "the other one".
But, I suggested a workaround for playing Amiga games in the meantime so he can keep using Recalbox.

[Substring]

@rustymg said in A few questions before diving...:

C64 has been removed from 4.1 beta and Amiga has been in limbo now for, hmmm, a year easily, along with bezels, so no offence meant to anyone, but I personally think you may need to look to "the dark side" depending on how urgent your need is, as I can't see either coming anytime soon, certainly not before 4.2 in my opinion.

The cd32 emulator installation detailed elsewhere however allows you to play hundreds of Amiga games in the meantime. I have about 80 standalone games plus about 5 compilation iso's that have hundreds of games on each, and there is no messing with disk swapping etc.
I can confirm it works on 4.01 and 4.1 beta.

I guess I may also express my feeling towards such words ?

C64: removed, as the one who contributed for the emulator made barely half the job. Once we started testing it, it just didn't work. That was an external contribution that was lacking quite much. But still, that guy made an effort to do what he could on his side, submitted his work.

Bezels : have you noticed the overlays folder in the share ? I've answered many times on the forum how to make this work. You may as well use the search function, and eventually write the wiki part as a proof of your personnal investment on the project

Amiga: there is really very much to say about it. 1st of all: the available emulators are a mess, no other word. They are barely configurable from outside, hardly documented, this makes the task tremendous to add it to recalbox and make it fit recalbox standards. That was until midwan decided to go on his own with amiberry. Since, the sun is rising again, we're carefully watching. Meanwhile, (and i've had quite a few argues with people from here, including voljega), we don't add emulators that are not integrated in the recalbox way. I don't want to disclose anything yet nor give false hope, but looks like someone decided to go the recalbox way to add amiga. And we're always here to help people work on recalbox, really wink wink

So, you've heard my opinion : Recalbox is a particular beast, that is much more complicated than Retropie on the dev side. Let me remind you we handle everything in the OS, from the kernel configuration to the final upgrade you download. I really mean everything including finding host servers, deploying and upgrading the forum, making sure the 4.1 release won't be the same chaos as 4.0.1 ... So much work that is not just pure emulator feature. And it does take us quite a lot of time. I hope you won't mind if, sometimes, we spend our free time on something else.

Retropie is 4 years old, has many more contributors than Recalbox that is 2.5 years old, and very few people participating in it. What a gap ...

And we hate when people compare recalbox to retropie/lakka/whichever ... All of them have different goals, you can't just compare on a "available emulators" base. I do respect anyone's work, we do speak bad on other projects, we even go on very well with the devs of some, when some other projects spit on us. But we won't get as low as them.

[RustyMG]

@substring
Please do not missunderstand me. I agree with every word you have said.
I'm not questioning anyone's commitment to the cause. I also appreciate the 2 emu's in question aren't available as they simply don't work, and nothing to do with the lack of effort on your behalf (although I believe the argument in another thread that the Amiga one DOES now work makes a good case).

In a nutshell I was just replying to the "Everything is there except C64 and Amiga but they will likely be there before the end of the year" comment, which I found to be ludicrously optimistic and almost funny. I didn't think it fair to give a new user who wasn't aware of the threads on these emu's false hope. Nothing more.
And from what's just been said above, it looks as if I'm right?!

[Substring]

@rustymg Among the massive changes with 4.1, there is one which is important : get rid of 1+ year development cycles. We've always said that we need to launch 4.1 to get a much better release cycle. So, monthly, that's the aim.

Knowing who works on what regarding C64 and Amiga + the approximate release date of 4.1, saying "by the end of the year" doesn't sound that much optimistic to me. But I understand your skepticism, we are not really reliable when it comes to ETA, release dates etc ... But that's something we definitely want to improve.

[gerpy]

Thanks everybody. I'm not in a hurry so I'll wait.

So I've installed Recalbox and it is really as advertised : just copy the files on a micro SD card and it works. I've added a spare BT dongle to make shure that my 8BitDo controlers would work properly. The only difficult thing was to format a 128Gb card in FAT32.

I'm now in the ROM and BIOS stuff? I grabbed full rom sets (reference fullset for MAME178, FBA reference full set, and the No-Intro ROMs, as well GoodRom fullsets for several missing system) but ouch... I end with thousands of games, most beeing forks of others. I'll need to figure out a way to (automativally) reduce... I'm investigating ClrmamePro but I cannot make it do what I want. I through that my ROMsets ware standardized, but ClrmamePro seems to struggle pairing DAT files with my zip files. I thing that I'm actually starting the diffucult part, afetr the flawless installation of the Recalbox.

About Kodi and Plex : the desired extension installs and a sync with my Plex server is currently occuring. So I'm optimistic.

[RustyMG]

@gerpy
ClrmamePro was absolutely daunting when I first tried it but there is an excellent "walk thru" video on YouTube.
It makes it so easy to figure out.
I used it and now instead of 4700 MAME roms including 31 Galaxians, 25 Street Fighters and 2 million Space Invader clones I have 2300 unique ROMS that work on Recalbox.
Honestly, give it a go after watching the video ( will post link if I can find it later)