Play PS2 Games Over SMB Using Raspberry Pi 4 Tutorial (2020) ()
I just finished setting up 'psx-pi-smbshare' with an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ and it works awesome to share games directly over ethernet. This solved my previous workflow issue of having to have an old Dell Optiplex I've used as a file server to host the games over SAMBA share.
Anyway, I'm using the same exact HDD drive and it works just fine in terms of loading games.
However, the icing on the cake that I'm trying to work on is to get the cover art to work.
I'm using Fedora Linux on my various machines (specifically Fedora Server), so I basically did the following tasks to get some cover art:
I found this particular Internet Archive dump page of all the PS2 cover art from one user:
I then proceeded to download this zip onto my Fedora Server laptop
I then plugged in the same external HDD mentioned before into my Dell Optiplex file server
I then mounted the HDD via 'sshfs' to remotely mount the drive as a regular user onto my current Fedora laptop
I pasted the contents of the 'ART' folder DIRECTLY into the corresponding 'ART' folder on the HDD.
I then examined the file permissions and noticed that most files in other directories have the following permission:
-rw-r--r-- (Aka, this means '0644' file permissions in terms of Linux file permissions)
With this in mind, I assumed that this had to be the case for the contents of the 'ART' folder as well to make sure that the file permissions were '0644'.
I also noted that the 'ps2player' user and 'sambashare' group member had access to the other folders and files on the same drive as well
With this in mind, I used the following two commands to make sure that the cover art images within the "ART" folder had the correct permissions and ownership so that OPL can do its thing to load the cover art images properly (NOTE: The reason I made sure I also had a user called 'ps2player' have access to this is that I also want it to STILL work for my Dell Optiplex SAMBA share in case I still ever want to host PS2 games via SAMBA from that machine. Also, I used this completely separate guide to do that process initially, sharing here for anyone else in case they're interested as its a good guide: "https://www.vikaskumar.org/2020/10/02/ps2-freemcboot-smb.html")
While in the correct directory
chown ps2player
chown :sambashare
I then proceeded to turn the Raspberry Pi on and the PS2 on
I then opened OPL, and then went into the settings and enabled cover art, automatic refresh for the images, and kept the default theme.
I then saved my settings accordingly.
I then restarted the PS2 completely, but still receive no cover art.
I am using OPL Version 1.0.0. This came with the FreeMcBoot enabled memory card I bought on Amazon.
My console is the Slim PS2 model (not sure of the model number). FreeMcBoot is on version 1.966, and this is loaded via the memory card.
I am using a Seagate Portable Drive 1TB via SAMBA with Raspberry Pi via this GitHub project and related YouTube video:
I just finished setting up 'psx-pi-smbshare' with an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ and it works awesome to share games directly over ethernet. This solved my previous workflow issue of having to have an old Dell Optiplex I've used as a file server to host the games over SAMBA share.
Anyway, I'm using the same exact HDD drive and it works just fine in terms of loading games.
However, the icing on the cake that I'm trying to work on is to get the cover art to work.
I'm using Fedora Linux on my various machines (specifically Fedora Server), so I basically did the following tasks to get some cover art:
While in the correct directory
chown ps2player chown :sambashare