After taking a closer look in the "MiSTer Downloader" documentation, especifically about custom databases, I kept wondering if it'd be possible to set a shared folder in my network containing all necessary ROMs and use "downloader.sh" to do all the work for me.
I made some experimentation and could finally set it done. Three steps are necessary to accomplish this:
- As I wanted to a shared folder as a provider, it's first necessary to setup a cifs folder directly in MiSTer. This is easily achievable using "cifs_mount.sh" script provided officially by Scripts_MiSTer Repository. Just download "cifs_mount.sh", copy it to Scripts folder in /media/fat and configure it accordingly (the script is well documents and should not be any trouble). Execute it to have /media/fat/cifs folder available as your personal ROM repository.
- It's necessary a custom dabase in JSON format (which is generated using this script, see next section)
- Now it's necessary to make "donwloader.sh" aware of the custom datase. For this, edit "/media/fat/downloader.ini" file. As we put the custom database in the shared folder (which is mounted as /media/fat/cifs on MiSTer) we can add the following lines:
[cifs_roms_db]
db_url = '../cifs/cifs_roms_db.json'
As it's not an http URL, the script will use it as a relative path.
To genarate the custom database for "downloader.sh" is quite simple. Just download this script and run it as follows:
./build_database.py <path_to_shared_folder>
It will parse the folder and generate "cifs_rom_db.json" in that folder.
Important: the script uses DOS line termination.
To use in Mac/Linux you might need to convert it using dos2unix tool.