ROMS on external USB media - EmuELEC/EmuELEC GitHub Wiki

EmuELEC can mount your ROMS from a USB pen-drive/hdd.

NTFS/EXFAT formatted drive is recommended, but fat32 and ext4 should also work.

To do this just create a directory in the root of your USB media called "roms" and include a file (not a directory) named "emuelecroms" (no extension!) inside the roms directory.

Copy the roms you wish to the corresponding path, to find the correct name of the directory of each system, please visit this link: https://github.com/EmuELEC/EmuELEC/wiki/Supported-Platforms-And--Correct-Rom-Path

for example:

USB/  
   /roms
    /roms/nes
            (nes games go here)
    /roms/snes
            (snes games go here)
    /roms/genesis
            (genesis games go here)
    ...(rest of the systems, etc)
    /roms/emuelecroms 

You do not need to create all the folders you are not using.

Connect your USB and restart Emulationstation from the quit menu

Note that it is not posible to have roms on both internal and external medias with just this setup: only ROMs from the external media will be accessible.

If you want to mix ROMs from several medias, be it internal + external, or multiple external, and you're on EmuELEC v4.6 or newer, you can read further on the next document to set up a mixed ROMs storage.

If you did everything right but the external drive is not mounted you can try this:

Edit /emuelec/configs/emuelec.conf and change #ee_load.delay=0 to ee_load.delay=x where x is the amount of seconds to wait for the drive to mount. If it still not mounting maybe the device cannot provide enough power to the drive, try changing USB ports or adding external power.