ARpiCADE 3.8 Release!

[Guyton]

Nice to see a new update! Going to test the sounds in attract mode, it's nice to see that you fix things that we users mention! Thanks for fixing that!

I have a question. Do you have an easy way of increasing the space of the FAT32 partiton BOOT? I need more room for my ROMs.

I can figure out a way, but wondering how you suggest I do it.

Thanks!

[dee2eR]

Nice to see a new update! Going to test the sounds in attract mode, it's nice to see that you fix things that we users mention! Thanks for fixing that!

I have a question. Do you have an easy way of increasing the space of the FAT32 partiton BOOT? I need more room for my ROMs.

I can figure out a way, but wondering how you suggest I do it.

Thanks!

Resizing the fat partitoin is a little involved but not really hard at all, just a few steps in it.

Checkout post #1185 on this page of this thread: (not my post but it's a good one, even has screen shots)
https://www.aussiearcade.com/showthread ... PI/page119
Not written by me but very comprehensive instructions for expanding the fat partition.

There are other ways too, any partitioning software thats worth having should be able to do it. Basically you move the ext partition 'to the right' to make space and backup the fat32 partitions contents to your harddrive before resizing (or remaking) the fat32 partition to fill the newly created space. Must be fat32, exfat may not boot in Pi, NTFS definately won't boot in the Pi. Once you have your newly resized fat32 partition copy the original data back onto it and it should be good to go.

[_jack_]

First of all, thank you very very much for this amazing project !!
I am an happy raspberryjamma owner and succesfully update to new 2.8 release. I succesfully connect to internet via wi-fi to my router and can surf the sd card via ssh and filezilla from windows... so the question is:
I would be able to do a scraping of the roms for video preview downloads ( as someone did in retropie, for example ). I see there is a scraper entry in the service menu and also the video option ... so are there some istructions to use the scraper in arpicade?
Thank you in advance for the answer

There's not currently a video scraper, I have written one but decided to keep it off the ARpiCADE release as it would be very easy to corrupt the SD card accidentally downloading too many video files to fit on the card. I might release it sepperately at some point or add some sanity checks to make it safer... not sure yet. If there's demand for a Linux terminal based video scraper for MAME roms please let me know.

Having this feature could be nice and useful. I will try to compile a simpler one in c++ under windows and Qt.
Thank you very much for the reply.

[dee2eR]

Having this feature could be nice and useful. I will try to compile a simpler one in c++ under windows and Qt.
Thank you very much for the reply.

Let me know if a bash script version would help you out there, I can always post up what I have for the brave to try (I may even have uploaded it somewhere already I can't remember...). I believe bash isn't particularly useful for Windows but maybe my logic will help somehow. You can probably figure it out though MAME naming conventions make it pretty straightforward, a console game video scraper would be harder to do.

Now I'm thinking about adding a free space sanity check so it is Pi safe... I guess I'll look at it again sometime.

[_jack_]

Having this feature could be nice and useful. I will try to compile a simpler one in c++ under windows and Qt.
Thank you very much for the reply.

Let me know if a bash script version would help you out there, I can always post up what I have for the brave to try (I may even have uploaded it somewhere already I can't remember...). I believe bash isn't particularly useful for Windows but maybe my logic will help somehow. You can probably figure it out though MAME naming conventions make it pretty straightforward, a console game video scraper would be harder to do.

Now I'm thinking about adding a free space sanity check so it is Pi safe... I guess I'll look at it again sometime.

I will try, on a spare time, to do a little gui application following the online database in www.progettosnaps.net website. I would like to have an automatic roms scanner and snaps dowloader ( choosing also the destination folder, for potential space problems in the SD card). Obviously, if I will take success, I will share the result.

[chunksin]

Having this feature could be nice and useful. I will try to compile a simpler one in c++ under windows and Qt.
Thank you very much for the reply.

Let me know if a bash script version would help you out there, I can always post up what I have for the brave to try (I may even have uploaded it somewhere already I can't remember...). I believe bash isn't particularly useful for Windows but maybe my logic will help somehow. You can probably figure it out though MAME naming conventions make it pretty straightforward, a console game video scraper would be harder to do.

Now I'm thinking about adding a free space sanity check so it is Pi safe... I guess I'll look at it again sometime.

Not sure if it helps but you can now run bash script in Windows 10 if you install Windows Subsystem for Linux and download Ubuntu shell from the Windows Store. I've found it really useful for testing at work

[cool_factor]

Is the 3.8 full download available yet with the added updates incorporated or are new fixes still being added/worked out?

[dee2eR]

Sorry haven't got the re-release done yet. It shouldn't be much longer, I got a bit distracted while working on it and starting trying a few things...

[Guyton]

Nice to see a new update! Going to test the sounds in attract mode, it's nice to see that you fix things that we users mention! Thanks for fixing that!

I have a question. Do you have an easy way of increasing the space of the FAT32 partiton BOOT? I need more room for my ROMs.

I can figure out a way, but wondering how you suggest I do it.

Thanks!

Resizing the fat partitoin is a little involved but not really hard at all, just a few steps in it.

Checkout post #1185 on this page of this thread: (not my post but it's a good one, even has screen shots)
https://www.aussiearcade.com/showthread ... PI/page119
Not written by me but very comprehensive instructions for expanding the fat partition.

There are other ways too, any partitioning software thats worth having should be able to do it. Basically you move the ext partition 'to the right' to make space and backup the fat32 partitions contents to your harddrive before resizing (or remaking) the fat32 partition to fill the newly created space. Must be fat32, exfat may not boot in Pi, NTFS definately won't boot in the Pi. Once you have your newly resized fat32 partition copy the original data back onto it and it should be good to go.

Thanks for the info! Here's how I accomplished it from my Windows 10 machine, could be useful for others.

Download:
GParted Live USB https://gparted.org/liveusb.php (I used method B to install to USB stick, you can use any method listed)
OSFMount https://www.osforensics.com/tools/mount ... mages.html
Win32DiskImager https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
SD Memory Card Formatter https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/ (not critical, but I use it to make sure)

You'll need:
A USB Flash Drive (I believe it needs to be 500 MB or bigger, I used a 1GB, that's what I had)

Install Win32DiskImager and make a copy of your card by click on Read and saving it with a .img file extension (just in case something goes wrong, and also if you need your ROMs etc...)

Install SD Memory Card Formatter and format your card. Make sure it detects the size of your card properly.

Download and write the Arpicade img to your microSD card with Win32DiskImager. Keep a copy of the Arpicade img file you downloaded, you'll need it later.

Remove your MicroSD card from your computer (prevent from writing GParted on it by accident)
Write GParted Live to the USB Flash Drive by following the instructions on the download page for GParted Live USB

Put your MicroSD card back in and boot into GParted from the USB stick (I had to disable Secure Boot in my BIOS for it to boot)

In GParted, make sure you're looking at your MicroSD card and not your computer's hard drive

Select the linux partiton (the one on the right side, not the BOOT partition) and click on Resize/move
Drag the partition all the way to the right and apply the change. I had an error when I did this to my 32 GB card, the error turned out to be that the linux partiton was too small to be moved, so I first increased the size a bit and was then able to move it to the right.

Next, select the BOOT partition and click Resize/Move and stretch the BOOT partition to take up all the left over space and apply the change.

Boot back into Windows. Install OSFMount and mount BOOT partiton from the Arpicade img file you downloaded and wrote to the card.

Browse to the mounted drive letter OSFMount mounted the image file to, copy all the files and folders and paste them onto the BOOT partition on your MicroSD overwriting existing files.

At this point, you can eject your MicroSD and test it in your Pi to make sure it works before copying your roms, snaps, etc...

If the Pi boots up from the card, turn off the Pi, put the MicroSd card back in your computer

Again with OSFMount, you can mount the backup img file you created at the beginning. Copy the Roms, snaps, marquees, etc from your old card image and paste them onto your MicroSD card.

[_jack_]

Having this feature could be nice and useful. I will try to compile a simpler one in c++ under windows and Qt.
Thank you very much for the reply.

Let me know if a bash script version would help you out there, I can always post up what I have for the brave to try (I may even have uploaded it somewhere already I can't remember...). I believe bash isn't particularly useful for Windows but maybe my logic will help somehow. You can probably figure it out though MAME naming conventions make it pretty straightforward, a console game video scraper would be harder to do.

Now I'm thinking about adding a free space sanity check so it is Pi safe... I guess I'll look at it again sometime.

Not sure if it helps but you can now run bash script in Windows 10 if you install Windows Subsystem for Linux and download Ubuntu shell from the Windows Store. I've found it really useful for testing at work

I wrote a little gui qt4 windows app, to retrieve the video snaps. It was tested only with some mame zip roms. Giving a scan path and a saving path, it scan recursively for the roms and download the available snaps from the www.progettosnaps.net website. It also write a log in a .txt file with a list of not found snaps.

If someone is interested I can share this little free app.

Thank you