semi-official OSMC support

[joolswills]

I am one of the main RetroPie devs.

I have installed OSMC, and have been adjusting the system a bit for "improved" compatibility.

Still a work in progress, but it should enable you to have to do less work in your helper/installer script.

Things like mapping dependencies like libraspberrypi-dev to rbp-userland-dev-osmc

removing the system sdl2 to replace with ours.

and so on.

[joolswills]

I see you have started another project - so may not be relevant anymore, but since I wanted to add jessie support (build from source only), it made sense to put in some OSMC workaround too. Cheers.

[mcobit]

Thanks for that. As you already saw, I started another project because changing of dependencies of retropie crashed the osmc installation pretty hard when retropie packages removed system relevant packages for osmc.

I now use a slightly modified retropie image in a chroot to get full functionality. That works pretty well and you can even update it without risking to destroy your system.

Thanks again for your efforts. May I contact you if I have some questions or problems regarding your scripts?

[joolswills]

Once my changes are done / tested, there shouldn't be any dependency problems - might be worth exploring - saves having a system inside a system. Although the chroot has the advantages of wheezy binaries should work nicely etc.

you can email me if you have questions, and I will help as much as time allows. for actual retropie-setup bugs you can post on the bugtracker - and the forum is useful for configuration help etc.

[mcobit]

That's nice. You can ping me if you are ready. I can test, too and adjust my scripts to switch between kodi and emulationstation.

[joolswills]

Feel free to test now - things like sdl1 / sdl2 build/install ok now. fixed a few modules up, and emulationstation / retroarch both build and run. There may be emulators still that don't know due to newer gcc or missed dependency issues - i've not tested everything yet.

[mcobit]

You used a raspberry pi 2, right? That uses mainline debian instead of raspbian.

[joolswills]

I use an emulated chroot dev environment - but I have also tested building various stuff on OSMC on a rpi2 - the dependencies are basically the same anyway between raspbian jessie / mainline debian jessie

[joolswills]

if you haven't tested yet might be worth holding on - just changing the sdl2 packages so they satisfy jessie dependencies - otherwise it's not possible to apt-get install stella and have our sdl2 installed.

[mcobit]

Ok. I did not test as ny freetime is limited right now anyway. I think I also didn't find a tslib package in jessie.

Another problem is that when I want to switch between Kodi and emulationstation, I will always have to ship a custom version of the emulationstation script as yours restarts if es is shut down. I think for now the chroot is a more complete and safer solution but of course it will be great to have it working alongside without hassle. It would also safe a lot of diskspace because there is no need for dual libraries, binaries etc.

[joolswills]

sdl1/2 doesn't need libts and works fine without.

the restart es is minor - you can always launch it directly without launching via the script. I may add a config within retropie for the restart behaviour also.

But if you prefer to work with a chroot install, then that's also fine.

[mcobit]

Well, I also do other stuff in that script, like for some installations on a nfs share it needs the locale of the share to be created... But that is a really rare case. Did I invite you to read the forum topic already? https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/howto-retrosmc-retrogaming-on-osmc/6671

[joolswills]

Everything builds now except xroar, due to OSMC lacking /opt/vc/src (libraspberrypi-doc) - which I can fix by shipping those files separately.

[joolswills]

xroar is now fixed, so all the components should now build correctly.

[mcobit]

Thanks. Will try to build from source now.