[Ghostdivision]

Just want to thank everyone for the hard work involved in this project, its much appreciated.

I dont really understand how this works, but I do want to ask if it will be possible to play the roms if they are stored on a network location? Or will they need to be stored locally on the pc itself.

[rushingjs]

I am currently playing them from an NFS share from my NAS. I don't point to the NAS directly, running Ubuntu 12.04 and have modified my fstab file to mount a NAS directory to a folder on the local machine. I then have XBMC just point to that folder for ROMS. Works fine. I would assume there would be no difference if you wanted to point to the network location directly.

Joe

[Ghostdivision]

Thanks for the response, this is good to hear, one of the big issues currently for me is one or two emulators (using external emulators) seem to work over a network loading roms, but others dont, and having a small 60gb SSD drive in my htpc it will be great if i can eventually put my roms on the network server.

[garbear]

You'll prolly have the same experience with libretro cores, some support network shares and others don't. Fortunately, many cores have a "load from memory" mode, where XBMC reads the file into memory and passes that to the core, so any file that XBMC can see can be loaded by the core.

In your log file, you can search for a line that looks like 16:21:45 T:3628 INFO: GameClient: Allow VFS: yes, require zip (block extract): no. The "Allow VFS" part tells you if the core can load files from memory, and thus from network shares.

[King Dude]

For games that are <500MB big, I think it can be done without a huge drop in performance. However, if Gamecube and Wii game emulation is added sometime in the future, it may be a problem if your bandwidth is only 5-15MB/s. But Gamecube games I can imagine to be quite a ways down the road, at least a few more years, so by that time fiber optical networks that offer 1GB/s, the necessary bandwidth for streaming large games, will be more widespread.

[garbear]

Gamecube games are only 1.4GB, which translates to about 11s on gigabit ethernet at full throttle. Anyways, a better solution would be to expose XBMC's VFS to libretro cores, so that they can have an abstracted file interface similar to the rest of the code.

For now, don't expect XBMC to slurp up 700MB images into memory; every libretro core I've seen that deals with full-size CD images has "allow VFS" set to "no".