[PigVenus]

Can any of the emulators play their roms off of a USB harddrive?

Especially for the following emulators:
FCE Ultra GX
Snex9x GX
VisualBoy Advance GX
ScummVM
Genesis Plus
Wii2600
Wii64


Thanks!

[roy_newell]

Yep, pretty much all of them I think. FCE, SNES, Visual Boy also can boot off network shares.
Wii64 don't bother with just yet, the current release is unplayable however the team are working hard and a new version which looks mouthwatering is being released very soon.
Check out www.emulatemii.com for more on that

[PigVenus]

Sweet!

So, just to make it perfectly clear, the emulators themselves reside on the SDCard (in the homebrew channel's \apps folder), but their roms go on the usb harddrive? Do you have to set their configuration /.ini file to reflect the location of the roms?

Also, I am assuming that the part of the drive for the roms & homebrew must be FAT32. So part of the drive should be formatted WBFS and part of it FAT32? I just want be sure before wasting a lot of time loading the drive.

Thanks for your help.

[roy_newell]

I don't know bugger all about WBFS as I don't use these USB loaders, I stick to the good old fashioned chip and a disc routine.
I doubt very much if any emulators could read from a WBFS formatted drive so I would imagine yes you will need seperate partitions, and from the little I understand about WBFS you will need WBFS as the first partition and FAT as second.

And yes just to clear up again, emulators go on your sd card, roms can go on usb hard drive, some you may need to change ini files but most there is just an option within said emulator to load from usb, load from dvd, load from network etc

[PigVenus]

Following up with an answer to my original question:

My testing used an external HD with 2 primary partitions. Partition #1: FAT32 and Partition#2: WBFS.

The following emulators will play their roms from a USB harddrive:
- NES (FCE GX)
- Sega Genesis (Genesis Plus GX)
- Super Nintendo (Snex9x)
- Gameboy/Gameboy Color/VisualBoy (VisualBoy GX)
- PCEngine (Hugo)
- ScummVM

The most notable exception to this list is N64 (Wii64). I couldn't even get it to load games from the SDCard. I just kept getting "An Error Has Occurred" as soon as I selected "Load from SD" although everything is set-up correctly according to the documentation (\N64ROMS directory on root of SDCard).

Also, Coleco and Atari would not work from the USB HD, but their roms are very small anyways.

[mrpuppt]

Greetz...

Just curious PigVenus, I noted where you have both sections of your drive as primary. Is that necessary for the emus to pick up the rom files? I have my WBFS as primary and my FAT32 as logical.

When I try to load the files via USB in the SNES emu, it says it can't find it... and even gave me the "black screen with white text error" at one point. I had to reset the console. It's no trouble to move the files to the pc and redo the drive as it's empty save for the few roms I've placed on it. But if there's something else I'm doing or need to do...

Thanks for any help given!!!

Edit:

Upon further reading online, I discovered that I needed to have the Fat32 partition first and set as primary. Then I put the WBFS drive second also as a primary. It works!!! So far so good!!!

[PigVenus]

Glad you were able to fix your problem. In aswer to your question, the reason I have 2 primary instead of 1 primary and 1 logical is because you can have up to 2 primary partitions on a single harddrive. Since I have no interest in creating any more partitions, I went with 2 primaries because it seems things have fewer problems that way. However, for the Wii, it doesn't seem to matter based on what you are saying.

Also note, that to have better control over the creation of partitions, I use Acronis Disk Manager or Partition Magic 8 - both of which are ran from a boot disc (Linux/DOS respectively).