Installation instructions for the Steam Link emulator of old RetroArch game consoles and Kodi home media center
What is it all about and why is it needed?
RetroArch is a collection of emulators neatly packaged in one application. With it you can run games for consoles Nintendo 64, NES, PlayStation 1, SEGA and others, the application allows you to work on the basis of the Libretro API with a huge number of emulators. Libretro is a wrapper for all popular emulators. More than 40 emulator cores have been ported for Libretro, many of which are only part of RetroArch.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) - a free cross-platform media player and software for HTPC organization of open source. The graphical user interface allows you to easily manage video files, photos and music from that computer, optical disk, the Internet or a local network. It can be controlled using the remote control. A popular alternative to Windows Media Center from Microsoft and Front Row from Apple. Kodi supports custom plugins and themes. Kodi originally created as a media center application for the first-generation Xbox. But now it supports Linux, OS X (Snow Leopard, Leopard, Tiger, Apple TV), Apple iOS, Windows, Android and Raspberry Pi. Prior to version 14, the project was called XBMC (from the Xbox Media Center).
Proceed to install
First you need to install USBMount - this is a very small application, which is essentially just a script that mounts plug USB flash drives to Steam Link
Installation:
Download
from hereUSBMount archive, unzip the contents to the root of the flash drive (the flash drive must be in fat32), pull the power cord out of the link, stick the flash drive, stick the power cord and turn on the link, the USBMount icon will appear in the link menu, remove the USBMount installer from it, it on the flash drive is no longer needed
RetroArch swing for this
referenceInstallation is similar to USBMount.
copy folders from the archive to the root of the flash drive (the flash drive must be in fat32), pull the power cord out of the link, stick the flash drive, stick the power cord and turn on the link, RetroArch will be installed and the icon will appear in the link menu, pull out the flash drive and remove itonly installer RetroArch located on the steamlink / apps / path retroarch.tgz folder RetroArch on a flash drive do not touch .
Running games, first you need to download the Roma for example
from hereI will describe how I did it: on the flash drive with which I installed the retroarch in the RetroArch folder I created the Roms folder and threw in the Roma there, then pull out the power cord from the link, insert the USB flash drive, insert the power cord and turn on the link, first we press the USBMount icon something similar happens On the fast link reboot (the screen will flash black), only after that we start RetroArch, select the emulator core and the rum of the game. At the moment, RetroArch is an enthusiast port and many kernels are not supported.
list of supported kernels
fbalpha2012, fceumm, gambatte, genesis plus gx, mednafen, pce fast, mgba, nestopia, nxengine, pcs x rearmed, picodrive, prboom, snes9x 2002, stella
also, the author strongly does not recommend using the online kernel update (Core Updater), but has nothing against updating the Update Core Info Files, Update Assets, Update Databases parameters. The official blog of RetroArch developers claims to support Steam Link in the next versions.
Install Kodi:
download archive
kodi-17.5-2017-10-23.tgz, put on a USB flash drive along the steamlink / apps path the flash drive should naturally be in FAT32, pull out the power cord from the link, plug in the USB flash drive, plug in the power cord, start the link, install Kodi and the icon will appear in the link menu, you can use Kodi, and remove it from the flash drive installer
Kodi supports the Russian language, you can turn it on in the settings, as an experiment I installed the YouTube addon, connected via dlna to the computer's media data and viewed them, downloaded alternative covers and much more, everything worked without complaints. If you want to view media data from a connected USB flash drive via Kodi, do not forget to mount it first via USBMount, the media data on the USB flash drive must be arranged in folders.