This works great! I ended up purchasing a 1TB external hard drive today on the cheap. Got the games directory with MegaCD and TG-16CD folders set up, dragged a few ISOs over and blew away the ones I already had on the SD card to be sure there weren't any dupes between the storage devices. The cores recognized the hard drive location on the first try! This is awesome.
Thank you for this info! All your MiSTer info continues to be helpful even two years after getting on board with the project! Love it, thanks for all the informative videos. I often check back just to see if you post anything new - and if you don't, well you already posted a wealth of useful, informative and entertaining content, so for that I'll always be grateful!
To touch on what SmokeMonster stated: The USB drive can ONLY have a single folder on root called /games and then within there needs to be folders for the core. For example MegaCD would have /games/MegaCD - this would also be the spot to put the BIOS you wish as boot.rom If you have problems having the drive being seen in the file browse of the core, make sure there isn't a /games/MegaCD and /MegaCD folder(s) on the root of the SD card. I got Popful Mail running with an external powered drive but would love to use a USB powered drive because of space constraints, maybe when I get a BlisSter installed.
Oh okay. So basically, the external hard drive or USB jump drive etc can ONLY contain the games folder along with the cores inside that folder, correct? As in, no other files need to be on the root. I have other media on the hard drive but I don't want to delete it. It's a 4tb hard drive. I asked all this because my Miater couldn't detect the cores on my USB powered external hard drive
Another nice benefit of the USB hard drive is that it makes building the ROMs for the arcade cores very simple (via the build_mame_roms script). I keep a full set of MAME non-merged ROMs in my \Games\MAME\ folder on my USB hard drive for this reason.
Hey smoke, I had a real hard time getting this to work last night but figured it out eventually. Here's some info that might be valuable for new people like me: 1. The Linux filesystem is case sensitive while Windows is not. Directories must have the correct case. Windows cannot rename directories successfully. Games dir must be "games." Neo Geo dir must be "NEOGEO." Sega CD must be "MegaCD." 2. Sometimes, it just doesn't work. I tried to load up some Genesis games and it didn't see the roms. Then I successfully loaded up some Neo Geo and TG-16 roms and played for a while. Then I went back and loaded up the Genesis core and it saw the files. 3. It's counter-intuitive that you don't actually want MiSTer to mount the usb drive. It will sometimes attempt to mount at boot, and there is also the option to do so in the ui. When mounting the drive it will exclaim "No files!" because it's looking for .rbf files on the USB. This can be confusing.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I made a games folder on my external USB powered 4 TB hard drive. Then I put the Genesis core folder inside the game's folder and stuck the ROMs in the Genesis core folder. It can't detect the genesis games but the Mister is showing that space is being used. Help lol?
@@kjmullinz is the option "switch to usb" greyed out in the menu? if it's greyed out then the mister can't see it the usb drive. other than that make sure all your directory names are lower case. edit: don't actually use the "switch to usb" option, it being greyed out is just a good way to tell that your usb hasn't been mounted yet. edit edit: I had an externally powered usb drive for a while and it would take a few minutes for the mister to mount the drive
If anyone is having problems with MiSTer not detecting the folders on the harddrive. Make sure that system folder for the games are in the "games" folder. If it's in root the core won't detect the harddrive at all and boot just the root system games folder on the sd card. I found this out and took me many hours to figure this out. Hope this helps. It worked for me idk if there is something I did wrong. I don't have any system game folders on root anymore, just put them all in the "games" folder. everything working fine.
Quick question. For cores that would be too big or complex to run just off of the FPGA, is it possible to implement a core that runs partially on the FPGA and partially off the ARM cores? That would be absolutely dope for things that might not be possible on just the FPGA such as PS1 and the like!
I'm having a bit of trouble migrating to HDD. Simply because if I use the "Change to USB" option in MiSTer (main), I only have the games folder there, but no way of launching cores anymore. I could of course move the cores to the HDD as well though this isn't preferable imo in case I want to use the USB HDD only for larger [disc-based] games. Preferably I'd just like to browse the HDD using the setup I already have so all scripts, cores etc. is still stored on the SD. Not sure how I'd easily set up the update scripts to download to HDD either if that was how I have to solve this. Any tips is very much welcome!
So basically just have your games folder, cores, and ROMs on a USB external device (eg. Hdd, flash drive) similar to that of the SD card, and Mister should pretty much be able to read the games off of the external USB device and the SD card simultaneously, correct? 👍
So this doesn't work the way you say - when the USB drive mounts, it's mounting to /media/usbx, where x is the USB port number that it is attached to (0-7). How do you get it to mount to /media/games? I have the latest firmware/OS. Drive is NTFS formatted (there is no NTSF as mentioned in the video), and only has a games folder on it.
Is this officially out yet? I am traveling at the moment. Someone told me to get a powered external harddrive. Because it may draw to much power for the mister. I just grabbed a 2tb external my buddy had. it's fairly large but it's powered version. I formatted it exfat and it works on my other mister image. I did try it the other day with the beta build. Had some troubles but found out i had to delete the megacd folder so it detects the harddrive cuz it gets confused. I thought i herd that it reads both folders from SD card and harddrive. I was mistaken. I guess you can name the megacd folder something else to get both for when you don't have the harddrive.
I bet if you got a that mister usb hub or a blister it will be ok to have a non powered drive. IDK for sure. As they have there own power lead don't they. Non power drives are slower but i doubt it matters much cuz it just reads the image, not like it's loading anything right? Im waiting till the new year to get a blister thou i got the blisbox 4 play. pretty good so far thou i only tried my wii pro controller. My drive is 7200rpm, most non powered one's are 5200 rpm.
So...quick question. My external HDD works just fine. It's formatted NTFS. My cores see the content, but when I try to access the drive via FTP (Filezilla) at /media/usb0 I always receive an error that says "550 usb0: No such file or directory ." I've tried two different drives and both do the same. I'm using official USB board and I/O board. Any ideas?
Is this in the 'official' mister release? I saw somewhere that you mentioned it wasn't fully released, youy left a link to a test mister release. Not sure if I am messing something up but I'm not finding the games I put on the HDD.
Niall McCann Did you solve it. I’m still trying to use this new feature but I can’t see the games in my HD. The HD is making some noises and is not being detected by the DE10 nano
I found that it won't detect my USB folders if the folder still exists on the SD card. Even if it's empty. If I transfer those folder to the SD card completely it works but when I run the updater it recreated Neo Geo and Gameboy folder and I have to go in and delete them, any way to disable that?
Mark Escobar hey, nice information. My USB folders are not being detected as well. I will try your solution. Is there any other problem you found with the USB feature?
The 2nd SD card isn't actually used by any cores now, outside of dev use. The x68000 core only still relies on it because it hasn't been updated since VHD support came to MiSTer. But, x68000 isn't usable anyways. Hopefully it gets updated this year, since it would be huge if we could use it.
Today I tried to add an 4TB USB drive using a powered USB hub and i renamed my games folder on my SD card and I created a games folder on my NTFS usb drive and I put an SNES folder with a game in it (to test). I boot up mister and swapped to USB and i get "no files found" message. However, I can browse to the SNES folder via scripts menu option...so Mister can see it. But it's acting as if it is not reading anything from my SD card. I tried with exFAT and the same problem. I also copied over the entire contents of my SD card and I could run cores but nothing could write to the file system and i couldn't execute scripts. That happened with both NTFS and exFAT. And exFAT should just work since it doesn't have any sort of permissions layer. Any thoughts?
hello, I use an external hard drive WD Mi passport 1Tb, in conjunction with my Mister, I formatted it in exFAT, tell me what should be the size of the cluster. standard 128kb or 4-8kb?
Great video as always! Would you consider making a video how to setup a MisTer from the ground up? Maybe also with details on settings you personally prefer? Us “SmokemonsterManiac’s” would be forever grateful 🙏
Cores look for files in the following order: 1. SD root /core/ 2. USB drives 3. CIFs (network) 4. /games/core/ on the SD card.
This works great! I ended up purchasing a 1TB external hard drive today on the cheap. Got the games directory with MegaCD and TG-16CD folders set up, dragged a few ISOs over and blew away the ones I already had on the SD card to be sure there weren't any dupes between the storage devices. The cores recognized the hard drive location on the first try! This is awesome.
Thank you for this info! All your MiSTer info continues to be helpful even two years after getting on board with the project! Love it, thanks for all the informative videos. I often check back just to see if you post anything new - and if you don't, well you already posted a wealth of useful, informative and entertaining content, so for that I'll always be grateful!
To touch on what SmokeMonster stated:
The USB drive can ONLY have a single folder on root called /games and then within there needs to be folders for the core. For example MegaCD would have /games/MegaCD - this would also be the spot to put the BIOS you wish as boot.rom
If you have problems having the drive being seen in the file browse of the core, make sure there isn't a /games/MegaCD and /MegaCD folder(s) on the root of the SD card.
I got Popful Mail running with an external powered drive but would love to use a USB powered drive because of space constraints, maybe when I get a BlisSter installed.
I am trying with the HDF file for Amiga but it won't detect it for some reason, any ideas?
Oh okay. So basically, the external hard drive or USB jump drive etc can ONLY contain the games folder along with the cores inside that folder, correct? As in, no other files need to be on the root. I have other media on the hard drive but I don't want to delete it. It's a 4tb hard drive. I asked all this because my Miater couldn't detect the cores on my USB powered external hard drive
Another nice benefit of the USB hard drive is that it makes building the ROMs for the arcade cores very simple (via the build_mame_roms script). I keep a full set of MAME non-merged ROMs in my \Games\MAME\ folder on my USB hard drive for this reason.
Hey smoke, I had a real hard time getting this to work last night but figured it out eventually. Here's some info that might be valuable for new people like me:
1. The Linux filesystem is case sensitive while Windows is not. Directories must have the correct case. Windows cannot rename directories successfully. Games dir must be "games." Neo Geo dir must be "NEOGEO." Sega CD must be "MegaCD."
2. Sometimes, it just doesn't work. I tried to load up some Genesis games and it didn't see the roms. Then I successfully loaded up some Neo Geo and TG-16 roms and played for a while. Then I went back and loaded up the Genesis core and it saw the files.
3. It's counter-intuitive that you don't actually want MiSTer to mount the usb drive. It will sometimes attempt to mount at boot, and there is also the option to do so in the ui. When mounting the drive it will exclaim "No files!" because it's looking for .rbf files on the USB. This can be confusing.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I made a games folder on my external USB powered 4 TB hard drive. Then I put the Genesis core folder inside the game's folder and stuck the ROMs in the Genesis core folder. It can't detect the genesis games but the Mister is showing that space is being used. Help lol?
@@kjmullinz is the option "switch to usb" greyed out in the menu? if it's greyed out then the mister can't see it the usb drive. other than that make sure all your directory names are lower case. edit: don't actually use the "switch to usb" option, it being greyed out is just a good way to tell that your usb hasn't been mounted yet. edit edit: I had an externally powered usb drive for a while and it would take a few minutes for the mister to mount the drive
Thanks Smoke. This was a useful video.
If anyone is having problems with MiSTer not detecting the folders on the harddrive. Make sure that system folder for the games are in the "games" folder. If it's in root the core won't detect the harddrive at all and boot just the root system games folder on the sd card. I found this out and took me many hours to figure this out.
Hope this helps. It worked for me idk if there is something I did wrong.
I don't have any system game folders on root anymore, just put them all in the "games" folder. everything working fine.
Good point, thanks for posting this info.
Man, you are on fire with the amount of content these days. Keep going, learned a lot aready 👍
Thanks!
Thanks for the heads up on this topic. Wasn't sure until now if this feature is already live or just part of some nightly build. :)
Yep, it went live this morning :)
Thanks a lot for this again! I was in the dark, WoW 😮 this is a great
Thanks!
Awesome news. Thank you for sharing. Excellent videos.
Thanks :)
Awesome video! Well explained.
Thank you!
That outro animation looks sick!
Thanks!
More interested in getting a better look at that sweet looking mech keyboard smoke!
I have about 50 mech keyboards for some reason. I'm going to use one of my XT IBM Model Fs for MiSTer once I track down my XT-USB adapter in storage.
Yeah, this is a really cool feature.
Definitely handy to save on the cost of SD cards.
Quick question. For cores that would be too big or complex to run just off of the FPGA, is it possible to implement a core that runs partially on the FPGA and partially off the ARM cores? That would be absolutely dope for things that might not be possible on just the FPGA such as PS1 and the like!
Noob question here but where do you connect the external drive?
It needs to connect to either a powered hub, or the official USB Add-On Board
I'm having a bit of trouble migrating to HDD.
Simply because if I use the "Change to USB" option in MiSTer (main), I only have the games folder there, but no way of launching cores anymore.
I could of course move the cores to the HDD as well though this isn't preferable imo in case I want to use the USB HDD only for larger [disc-based] games.
Preferably I'd just like to browse the HDD using the setup I already have so all scripts, cores etc. is still stored on the SD.
Not sure how I'd easily set up the update scripts to download to HDD either if that was how I have to solve this.
Any tips is very much welcome!
I’ve tried 3 different hard drives and still not been able to get this working
So basically just have your games folder, cores, and ROMs on a USB external device (eg. Hdd, flash drive) similar to that of the SD card, and Mister should pretty much be able to read the games off of the external USB device and the SD card simultaneously, correct? 👍
I wonder if atari 7800 or cores like gameboy color, game gear, sega 32x, PS1 or even N64 will work
We already have GG & GBC. PS1 and 7800 are in the works.
So this doesn't work the way you say - when the USB drive mounts, it's mounting to /media/usbx, where x is the USB port number that it is attached to (0-7). How do you get it to mount to /media/games? I have the latest firmware/OS. Drive is NTFS formatted (there is no NTSF as mentioned in the video), and only has a games folder on it.
I couldn't get this to work like he said.
Does it work only on an hdd or can it work as well as on an usb ssd and/or usb flash? Also, does it matter what usb version it is (1.0, 2.0, 3.0...)?
Can u use a USB thumb drive?
Is this officially out yet? I am traveling at the moment.
Someone told me to get a powered external harddrive. Because it may draw to much power for the mister. I just grabbed a 2tb external my buddy had. it's fairly large but it's powered version. I formatted it exfat and it works on my other mister image.
I did try it the other day with the beta build. Had some troubles but found out i had to delete the megacd folder so it detects the harddrive cuz it gets confused. I thought i herd that it reads both folders from SD card and harddrive. I was mistaken. I guess you can name the megacd folder something else to get both for when you don't have the harddrive.
Yes, it was just released this morning :D
I bet if you got a that mister usb hub or a blister it will be ok to have a non powered drive. IDK for sure. As they have there own power lead don't they. Non power drives are slower but i doubt it matters much cuz it just reads the image, not like it's loading anything right?
Im waiting till the new year to get a blister thou i got the blisbox 4 play. pretty good so far thou i only tried my wii pro controller.
My drive is 7200rpm, most non powered one's are 5200 rpm.
So...quick question. My external HDD works just fine. It's formatted NTFS. My cores see the content, but when I try to access the drive via FTP (Filezilla) at /media/usb0 I always receive an error that says "550 usb0: No such file or directory
." I've tried two different drives and both do the same. I'm using official USB board and I/O board. Any ideas?
Try exFAT, NTFS is supported but some drives are flaky with it
@@SmokeMonster Yep..you got it. Thank you!!
Is this in the 'official' mister release? I saw somewhere that you mentioned it wasn't fully released, youy left a link to a test mister release. Not sure if I am messing something up but I'm not finding the games I put on the HDD.
Yeah, it's official if you're updated
@@SmokeMonster thanks, laddie. I must be making a mistake somewhere.
Niall McCann Did you solve it. I’m still trying to use this new feature but I can’t see the games in my HD. The HD is making some noises and is not being detected by the DE10 nano
@@carlosrobayo6621 NO, not yet. I organised everything on the sd card. To be fair I haven't tried this past week.
I found that it won't detect my USB folders if the folder still exists on the SD card. Even if it's empty. If I transfer those folder to the SD card completely it works but when I run the updater it recreated Neo Geo and Gameboy folder and I have to go in and delete them, any way to disable that?
Mark Escobar hey, nice information. My USB folders are not being detected as well. I will try your solution. Is there any other problem you found with the USB feature?
Same problem here... Did what you said and it's working now.
Thanks.
Should be solved in future updates.
@@Rurounik99 No problem.
@@carlosrobayo6621 No, besides the folder thing everything else works great
Thanks for the update - very neat. Does the hard drive need to be externally powered?
No, you can use unpowered hard drives as long as they're attached to a powered hub. Maybe really low power SSDs would work with an unpowered hub too.
Where did you get your case for your MiSTer?
A friend 3D printed mine for me. You can print one yourself or get it from a MiSTer parts seller.
Can you use this in place of the SD Card on the IO board for stuff like the x68000?
The 2nd SD card isn't actually used by any cores now, outside of dev use. The x68000 core only still relies on it because it hasn't been updated since VHD support came to MiSTer. But, x68000 isn't usable anyways. Hopefully it gets updated this year, since it would be huge if we could use it.
@@SmokeMonster Thanks for the reply. Would you recommend a powered USB hub? I've seen other people just use cheap ones powered by the DE10 nano.
What PSU are you using for this? Is the standard 5v 2A enough for this? Thx in advance
You'll need a powered hub for some HDDs
@@SmokeMonster yes I imagined that. Well since I'm using a microSD only i guess I won't have any power issues. Thx for the reply
hey this is pretty awesome. sd cards are easily corrupted! great way to avoid that
Today I tried to add an 4TB USB drive using a powered USB hub and i renamed my games folder on my SD card and I created a games folder on my NTFS usb drive and I put an SNES folder with a game in it (to test). I boot up mister and swapped to USB and i get "no files found" message. However, I can browse to the SNES folder via scripts menu option...so Mister can see it. But it's acting as if it is not reading anything from my SD card. I tried with exFAT and the same problem. I also copied over the entire contents of my SD card and I could run cores but nothing could write to the file system and i couldn't execute scripts. That happened with both NTFS and exFAT. And exFAT should just work since it doesn't have any sort of permissions layer.
Any thoughts?
did you make it?
Comments 1 week ago? *confused*
My Patrons had early access to this video.
hello, I use an external hard drive WD Mi passport 1Tb, in conjunction with my Mister, I formatted it in exFAT, tell me what should be the size of the cluster. standard 128kb or 4-8kb?
Great video as always! Would you consider making a video how to setup a MisTer from the ground up? Maybe also with details on settings you personally prefer? Us “SmokemonsterManiac’s” would be forever grateful 🙏
MadLittlePixel and Lon.TV both have great setup videos on their channels.
Can I use ext4 for my hard-drive?
Yeah, I believe so. ExFat works too.
We need vfd support for ao486, any chance on getting that?