Handheld game console

After thinking about my handheld console and ROM situation, I was thinking to get a 128GB SD card for my retro gaming needs, but this huge amount of storage will only make harder to search through all games. So I decided to use 32GB. This should hold ROMs for most classic systems, though I'm excluding the more storage-hungry Dreamcast, PSX, and PSP.

Rather than cramming every available ROM onto my device (when most will never get played), I developed a smarter approach. Why store games I'll never touch when storage space is limited and many retro titles haven't aged well?

My Filtering Method

My solution is straightforward:

  1. Load video previews into VLC playlist
  2. Mark games that look interesting
  3. Copy those selected games to a dedicated folder
  4. Run a script to grab the corresponding media files (images/videos)

The Technical Challenge

While working on my bash script, I ran into issues with the "find" command not handling filenames containing spaces. I solved this by temporarily changing the IFS (Internal Field Separator) variable:

SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'

# Get the list of files
FILES_LIST=$(find $DEST_FOLDER -maxdepth 1 \( -name '*.*' \) -type f | sed -e 's/$/\x01/' )

# Process each file
for filepath in $FILES_LIST
do
    # Get filename with extension
    FILENAME=$(basename -- ${filepath} | cut -d'?' -f1)
    # Get filename only
    FILENAME="${FILENAME%.*}"
    
    process_media $FILENAME "images"
    process_media $FILENAME "videos"
done

# Restore original IFS
IFS=$SAVEIFS

Results Worth the Effort

This approach paid off nicely. For example, I trimmed my GBA collection from 6.1GB down to just 1.3GB, keeping only games I genuinely want to play.

Source code

https://github.com/onesixromcom/easyroms_media_copy

Resource Credit

A big thanks to the ArkOS team for their excellent "easyroms" collection. You can find their 100GB archive on archive.org:

  • https://archive.org/download/retro-arcade-v-04-rg-35-m-p
  • https://archive.org/download/retro-arcade-v-04-rg-35-m-p/easyroms.7z.torrent
linux
bash
games