MiSTer FPGA Forum

Just got my mister and getting started.

i only have a 16bg SD card for now, so limited on the games that are on it, but i have a spare 2tb external hard drive, is it as simple as having a folder on this drive with the games folder on this with all the console/arcade/computer roms in sub-folders on it? if so do i need to have the games folder on the SD card as well?

Thanks

It's that easy; as long as the drive is in a supported format (I'd highly recommend ExFAT), just have all your ROMs in the games folder on it, just like how they're structured on the SD card, but all you need is the Games folder.

What are the pro and con of the different file systems (ExFat, NTFS, ext4, ...)?
Where is the USB drive mounted? Wouldn't it be simpler if the drive without a Games folder was mounted on the SD card Games folder?

There's not really any pros to using a different filesystem. NTFS will cause headaches because various cores will need you to rename their games folders to match specific case-sensitivity.

jca wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 2:09 pm What are the pro and con of the different file systems (ExFat, NTFS, ext4, ...)?

exFAT wastes a lot of disk space in big SD cards because every file, no matter how small, uses space in multiples of 64K or more. With lots of small ROMs, e.g. those for the Atari 2600 or NES, these add up quickly.

This does not happen in extN. I had no luck when trying to set up ext2 in a previous version though. I haven't tried in a more recent version. No idea about NTFS because my main system is Linux and I have trouble setting up an NTFS partition.

I've worked around the problem by creating ZIP files with the initials of the ROMs. This way I have at most 27 files per core. This doesn't work in cores that use floppies and can write to them, though.