NEStalgia Project (Mini NESpi)

[stigzler]

Great reading, Felix! And I'm normally a guy who sticks to the funny papers. 

I'm loving all this stuff at the moment. Gone from full cab to renovating retro-console - loving the big to small switch! Just finished designing my own power/led/fan controller board for the Pi and perfected the pcb production technique through photo-resist methods. 

Absolutely love that NFC Reader embedded into cartridge tray vid. That guy's worked hard at that, no?

Look forward to seeing the final product in action!

[RIP-Felix]

29 minutes ago, stigzler said:

Great reading, Felix! And I'm normally a guy who sticks to the funny papers. 

I'm loving all this stuff at the moment. Gone from full cab to renovating retro-console - loving the big to small switch! Just finished designing my own power/led/fan controller board for the Pi and perfected the pcb production technique through photo-resist methods. 

Absolutely love that NFC Reader embedded into cartridge tray vid. That guy's worked hard at that, no?

Look forward to seeing the final product in action!

Yup, it a pretty good group of builders on the facebook group. Actually they're being knocked off now! Some douche bag took Evan's designs and reshaped them. Now he's selling for over $100. Oh, and his software install instruction link directly to Evan and Jared's script! WHAT A DICK!  I'd put a link to his website so you can see his bad english translation, but I don't even want to give him the free publicity. Frick'n leach!

There are a number of other kits available too. You should check out the OSH park PCBs (Here and Here)  (you can DL the PCB files and open in eagle). All the parts are linked in the PDF on their Gethub page. Pi control gives you nice control of fan thresholds, a convenient way to upload roms, and write to NFC tags. You can edit the script to add functionality if you want. It's a great starting point for further development I would think! Plus Evan and Jared have opened it to everyone for free without limitation, they don't care if you sell, or even need credit, as long as you don't try to pass it off as your own original work.

As for seeing the final product in action, well. I don't have a youtube account and don't particularly want to start one. So, I tend to just post other peoples content to show off the system capabilities. So just pics of my actual system, plus the videos others have made for now. You can get a pretty good idea of how it works. I haven't tried to upload an MP4 video on the forum, I wonder if that'll work?

[stigzler]

Cool links + nice boards. Great that these guys shared + including a parts list with digikey part numbers just tops it all!

Only thing is it's a bit scant on the functionality, though. Cant find any docs on the fan control for instance. How come the Mosfet? I've just used a surface mount transistor on mine to switch the 5V fan supply on and off via the 3.3V GPIO signal. Hope it doesn't blow up! :S

[hansolo77]

How do you like that controller Felix?  I have an 8BitDo N64 controller and find it's a little lacking.  I think my biggest complaint with it is that it doesn't have a SELECT button, so I can't use it to hotkey out of a game.  It also doesn't have any electronic contacts for supporting a rumble pak should I ever decide to play a game that support it.  That's not really a deal breaker though.  The classic NES controller though, complete with shoulder buttons looks great.  I'm just curious how well it works.  And the big doozy.. what if you have 2 and want to play a 2 player game? Does the color change to let you know which is P1 and P2, or something?  Or is it just a matter of when you connect the bluetooth?

[Adultery]

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/6/15/15809834/8bitdo-snes30-pro-bluetooth-controller-switch

I'm gonna buy one of these when it drops. It's like the nes30 but better.

[RIP-Felix]

On 8/12/2017 at 2:43 PM, stigzler said:

Only thing is it's a bit scant on the functionality, though. Cant find any docs on the fan control for instance. How come the Mosfet? I've just used a surface mount transistor on mine to switch the 5V fan supply on and off via the 3.3V GPIO signal. Hope it doesn't blow up! :S

In that pi control video, second half, he mentions/shows slider controls for the fan. It's plugged into the +5v rail, so you need a 5v fan, no biggie. Pi control has one slider for the CPU high temp (when the fan kicks in), low temp (When the fan kicks off), and the poll interval. You can set them to your liking. It's very easy. The mosfet I think, were for fan control. It ramps the fan speed up, but it's been awhile since I specifically dove into the technical aspects of the hardware. I'm a bit rusty and may be speaking out my butt.

On 8/12/2017 at 6:25 PM, hansolo77 said:

How do you like that controller Felix?  I have an 8BitDo N64 controller and find it's a little lacking.  I think my biggest complaint with it is that it doesn't have a SELECT button, so I can't use it to hotkey out of a game.  It also doesn't have any electronic contacts for supporting a rumble pak should I ever decide to play a game that support it.  That's not really a deal breaker though.  The classic NES controller though, complete with shoulder buttons looks great.  I'm just curious how well it works.  And the big doozy.. what if you have 2 and want to play a 2 player game? Does the color change to let you know which is P1 and P2, or something?  Or is it just a matter of when you connect the bluetooth?

I'm really liking the NES30 pro! At first I had some trouble getting it to stay paired, but then I saw that video I posted, and it solved my problem. Now, for the most part, it will pair every time without much difficulty. I have had to manually remove and re-register it once, but to be fair I was messing with a lot of settings and updating packages. So, it was probably related more to that. Before It would never reconnect, I had to repair in Bluetooth settings after each reboot, which made me unfairly critical of the controller. Now, I love it. I haven't paired another one to see if the leds change color, but I know you can pair multiple devices. The color of the leds do indicate what mode the controller is in however, so they may not want to change them for player 2 lest he/she incorrectly think they accidentally put it into android mode or something. They just get added to the Bluetooth registered device list by MAC address. I imagine you could have 4 easily. I'd look it up on YouTube to see if they change color if your interested, but I don't know.

I will tell you that it's not the most useful for N64, I don't really like where the z button is on the shoulder. It works ok though, having all the button you need to play 12 button games. It's more comfortable than an NES controller, shoulder buttons are harder to use than a SNES, but has similar feel otherwise. The buttons are stiffer than SNES, but satisfyingly so if that makes sense. I noticed playing asteroids that the d-pad is a bit sensitive. Pressing up to thrust away from an incoming roid had the annoying habit of simultaneously turning left or right, so I had to be extra careful to press perfectly up. It's less forgiving than a NES or SNES in that regard. The thumb sticks are quite good for such a small controller. They have good sensitivity and spring, maybe not as much travel as I would like and the left one should be transposed with the D-pad, but that would detract from the aesthetic. So I'll not hold that against it. It's still new, so maybe it will loosen up with use, only time will tell. No rumble. Battery life is about a short as a PS4, I'd like it to be better, but it's good for a long session if kept charged in between. Overall, 8bitdo nailed it IMO. My major gripes are mostly preference and concessions made for ascetic/NEStalgic reasons. I'm good with that.

[RIP-Felix]

21 minutes ago, Adultery said:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/6/15/15809834/8bitdo-snes30-pro-bluetooth-controller-switch

I'm gonna buy one of these when it drops. It's like the nes30 but better.

Oh, now that is tempting. Yes indeed! Thanks for the heads up! Actually the thumb sticks look like they will solve one problem I noticed with the NES30 pro, the PS4 style circles should make it easier to control the Thumb stick and click L/R 3. They also look wider, and will thus fit my fat thumbs better. The shoulder buttons look better, but I'm wondering now if those two circular buttons on the face below the D-pad and Buttons are where they moved L2 and R2? If so, that would make sense. They are not used much, so why detract from the feel and ascetic of a SNES controller? I like it a lot. I think I'll get one too.

[RIP-Felix]

     The above is just to tease a Raspberry pi NFC project I'm excited about making, if I get around to it. It will combine the above with NFC carts too. This will not be original work, someone else is working on a design of the US version in the facebook group. I'm waiting on his 3D models to be finalized, he's nearly there. I'm going to use the same kit as NEStalgia for "SNEStalgia". I'll have to rework the Power switch, but that's a very minor thing. I haven't decided if I'll do both the US and Euro version of the case, or just the US. I grew up with the US, so that's a must, but I do like the Pal version's ascetics better (Or I would have if I hadn't grown up seeing the US version). So, I may DL the above files from Thingiverse and modify it for NFC. Thoes SNES 8BitDo controllers will be great for these no?

[RIP-Felix]

Software continued...

Here is the Theme I'm using (NES_Mini) and how to install it:

 

     I ran into a few software hickups, retro pi is pretty user friendly on first boot, but has it's quarks like anything else.

1. My artwork was not staying put after I scraped it. After a reboot it would be erased and not save...grrr, It takes a long time to hand pick them, which is the better option if you don't want it scraping incorrectly! Obviously after doing this a few times, I got earked pretty good. So the solution was delete the "gamelist.xml" in the offending systems (some would save others would not), re-scrape everything, then press F4 to exit emulation station. This saves the XML. Then I could just type "emulationstation" in to get back to ES from the terminal (Linux, yuck). After reboot, all is well! Whew.
2. The retropi image is PAL oriented, meaning we Americans, having grown up with Turbo Grafx instead of PC engine and Genesis instead of Megadrive, have to make some changes to get things looking right. Here's how to get the Genesis logo, name, and images to appear instead. Using Filezilla or another FTP program to gain access to the Retropi filesystem, navigate to "/etc/emulationstation" and copy "es_systems.cfg" to your computer. Edit it in notepad++ (Better than Notepad for pi code because it shows the code on lines instead of wrapped). Navigate down to the Megadrive System and change it as follows:

     <system>
       <name>genesis</name>
       <fullname>Sega Genesis</fullname>
       <path>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/megadrive</path>
       <extension>.7z .smd .bin .gen .md .sg .zip .7Z .SMD .BIN .GEN .MD .SG .ZIP</extension>
       <command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ megadrive %ROM%</command>
       <platform>genesis</platform>
       <theme>genesis</theme>
     </system>

   I took this opportunity to navigate to the PSX system and add .bin and .BIN to the extension list so those filetyps will be recognized. ***EDIT*** Don't do this. Instead convert to PBP with PSX2PBP as detailed in the next post. If you do, you wont have to touch the PSX entry in the above file". It solves this problem in a much better way. The following is left for posterity. It shows the process I went through to figure that out.***EDIT***This was another problem I noticed and it was nice to kill two birds with this one file. I had problems getting the modified config file to FTP into the right folder. It kept failing to transfer. Eventually I got it into "/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation". I restarted ES and it worked for me after that.

I'm currently trying to figure out where to put my PS1 Bios to get PSX working, it freezes otherwise. That's where I'm currently at...

***EDIT***

Apparently, the PSX bios must be in the Roms folder. They say, it should go in the BIOS folder, but PCSX doesn't see it there. It only sees if if it's in same folder with the game being loaded. That's where Cue files come in. I never used to know what these were until recently, my bins worked fine on their own, so no need for the clutter I thought. But apparently they launch the game and point to audio tracks. Most games don't have separate audio tracks, so they don't do anything but launch the game, but the ones that do (wipeout for example) wont play an audio track when you get to the part of the game where is supposed to play. The cue file points to where they are in the image and the game will function as intended. They can thus improve the game. In retropi, *.bin is not seen by default anymore because they want you to keep cue/bin together and only want to display 1 entry. So above where I added it back was actually a not the proper way. I found this which has a good explanation of getting PS1 games running well, explained the CUS/BIN situation, and linked to a CUE library where I could get them back (I deleted them long ago). I'm still trying to figure out how to use *.m3u playlists for multi disc games, or better yet convert them to EBOOT *pbp with  PSX2PSP, and how to change disks in game. I ran out of time, it's time to get some ZZZs...

[RIP-Felix]

...Yawn...Okay, I'm refreshed and ready to get back at it!

PS1 Setup - Managing Multi-Disc Games

Converting ISO/IMG/BIN&CUE to PBP:

There are a number of advantages. PBP are compressed somewhat and may reduce the size of the games without much increase to load times in retroarch. They combine multi-disk games into 1 file and thus 1 entry in emulation station. You can port them to a PSP with custom fimware. Lastly, they load all the multi-disk games into the emulator so you can swap disks in game, without needing to exit back to emulation station. Given these advantages I decided to go this route. The process goes like this:

1. Obtain PSX2PSP and the required "BASE.pbp" (Place into "PSX2PSPv1.4.2\Files").
2. Run PSX2PSP.exe and choose your preferred theme. I like the classic mode instead of themed mode, but it doesn't matter.
3. Click on the "options" button. Double check that "when extracting iso, save toc as: CCD" is checked. Click on the "Folder" options tab. In the "Auto create folder on convert" choose "create main game title folder". This will put the EBOOT.PBP into a folder of the same name as the game instead of the Game ID, which makes it hard to know which game is which. Save and go back to main menu.
4. In the "ISO/PBP" drop down select file 1 and press the [...] box to select the first disc IMG/ISO/BIN. The rest of the boxes quite nicely auto fill with the correct information (Game ID, display name, and etc.) That's a nice feature! Use the "ISO/PBP" drop down to select file 2 and do the above for the remaining game discs.
5. Select images as desired. I just pointed the "icon" image at boxart for the game. You can preview the image and display name. This is how the game entry would appear on a PSP, which is nice. If and when I ever get a psp I'll have these done.
6. Press convert! It will fail if you didn't put "BASE.pbp" into "PSX2PSPv1.4.2\Files".
7. In the output folder will be the file "EBOOT.PBP". If you're going to port this over to a PSP, you need to keep it in this format, but since I'm putting it on NEStalgia I just need to rename the file to match the game so emulation station can easily scrape artwork for it. "Metal Gear Solid (USA).PBP", for example, will work fine.
8. FTP your newly minted PBPs into "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx", restart emulation station, scrape artwork, press F4 to exit ES and save the metadata XML, type "emulation station" into the terminal to get back to ES, and start a multi-Disk game. Enjoy!
9. To change a disc: Press Hotkey+X (Brings up retroarch menu) --> Quick Menu --> Disk Control --> Disc cycle tray status to "open tray" (you'll see a text dialog confirm the command) --> Disk index (Change to disc number desired) -->  Disc cycle tray status again to "close tray" --> Hotkey + X. If you were on the change disk prompt page it will automatically continue. If not, Press Hotkey + B to reset. This will reset the emulator on the disk you chose. This is useful if you want to continue a save, say from disc 3, and don't want to wait for the prompt appear - since Disc 1 is always loaded first when launching from emulation station. Just wait for the game to load, go into retroarch menu, change to your disc, reset, and continue from your last save. I love this sooo much!!!

You can get some compression out of the process. I got 25-40% compression from most of my games in ISO/BIN/IMG format! This means I can fit more on my precious little 32GB microSD card. This was a welcome surprise! I converted all my games, multi-disc or not, to pbp for this reason. It's kinda hit or miss, however. Some games don't compress, other do. I went from 24.6 GB down to 19.9GB.  That's not too shabby (~20% smaller)!

[Adultery]

Been using this method for a while for my PSP. It's nice for sure, and you can put in game manuals too!

For your BIOS issue you mentioned... If you're using the RetroArch core for PSX, you can change that path in the settings and have it point wherever you like (as long as you don't need elevated permissions to access there). You'll probably want to do the same for your saves.

RAis pretty open, but you'll need to do that stuff outside of ES... Unless there's some way to launch RA without any cores inside ES that I don't know about.

[RIP-Felix]

4 hours ago, Adultery said:

For your BIOS issue you mentioned... If you're using the RetroArch core for PSX, you can change that path in the settings and have it point wherever you like (as long as you don't need elevated permissions to access there). You'll probably want to do the same for your saves.

RAis pretty open, but you'll need to do that stuff outside of ES... Unless there's some way to launch RA without any cores inside ES that I don't know about.

Yep, I saw that too, but it didn't seem to work. So put a copy into BIOS and ROMS. The one in roms works because it's the default location. Since I converted all my PSX games to PBP files I was able to remove .bin and .BIN from "es_systems.cfg" for PSX. This is done by default, so I you start with PBP files you wont have to do anything. Just put the bios into the psx/roms folder and forget about it. I'll edit my earlier post to reflect this change.

4 hours ago, Adultery said:

Been using this method for a while for my PSP. It's nice for sure, and you can put in game manuals too!

I now want to get myself a PSP, or better, a Vita if it will work. I wanted to go all out and get them looking spiffy, before converting. However, for the sake of time and because I wanted to get these on the pi and move on to other things, I just added the Boxart and left it at that. Emulation station doesn't care anyway.

[hansolo77]

Or you could do what I did.... get a 4tb Hard Drive (usb powered) and install that with every ROM ever on a Pi dedicated to playing just PSX games, and put it all inside a broken PSX case. 

[RIP-Felix]

I like keeping most of my game lists between 30 - 100 for ease of navigation. I look up top 100 lists of games for ideas of ones I 'd like to try and also grab my old favorites. This makes scraping and finding the game I want to play easier. I haven't even attempted MAME yet......it scares me. Unless I import the entire romset won't it have issues with parent roms and such. I just don't even want to think about tackling that can of worms yet. So far, I'm sticking with the 8-32bit console era for NEStalgia.

[RIP-Felix]

Spiffing Things up! - System Bezels and Run Command Themes

Run command Splash screen:

Spoiler

 

     There is one error in the tutorial. The "launch menu art" option needs to be disabled or your scraped art will show instead of the system splash.

• Run Command System Splash Artwork Download Page
• Use filezilla or whatever to drop the system files into "/opt/retropie/configs". Each system folder just contains a "launching.png" file, so It will simply merge this into your existing system folders or copy them if it's not already there.
• Now system specific launching splash screens will display instead of that horrid little box!

System Bezels:

Spoiler

 

• System Bezel Download page. Here is the dev page where the DL link was, in case it breaks.
• Using filezilla or whatever copy the "borders" file into "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/overlay".
• Go to retropi and restart emulation station
• Start a game in any system. Enjoy your custom Run command launching splash screen you installed earlier!
• Pres Hotkey+X --> Settings --> Onscreen Display --> Onscreen Overlay:
• Change "Hide Overlay in Menu" to off so you can see the bezels.
• Choose "Overlay Preset" and "borders" to select the system bezel to use. Note that the NTSC NES is "Nintendo.cfg" and SNES is "Super-Nintendo.cfg" These weren't really named well. Under NES and SNES there are just famicom and super famicom bezels. If that's what you want, great. If not, that's how to find what you're looking for. There are alternates too. Choose the one you like best.
• Still on the "Onscreen overlay" screen, set the "Overlay Opacity" to 1.00 and go back one page to "Onscreen Display"
• Choose "Onscreen Notifications" and increase the "Onscreen Notification X position" to 0.150 so notifications don't get cut off by the completely opaque bezel.
• Go back to Settings --> Video:
• Change Aspect ratio to 4:3. I recommend doing this to keep NTSC formatted pixels looking the way they're meant to on a CRT. It also fits best within the bezels. You could choose "custom" and adjust the X and Y position to fit as you like within the bezel, but I prefer choosing 4:3 so that ratio is maintained. It may just be me, but it seems to minimize input lag in game.
• Go back to  Main Menu --> Quick Menu --> Shaders --> Load Shader Preset: You can apply a CRT filter from the list of shades to add scan-lines and get that retro look. I like it, but it really feels like it adds input lag. IDK, maybe it's just me. To revert back to stock go down to "Shader #0" and choose "stock.cfg". Hit Apply Changes at the top.
• Once everything is setup as you like it, go back to Quick Menu --> Save Core Overrides: This saves all the changes to the entire system, making the changes to all the games in that system. If you just want the settings to apply to this game, choose "Save Game Overrides". That can be useful for the controls section, if you just want to change controls to a more comfortable configuration for just one game, but not have it apply to all of them.
• Press Hotkey + X to exit bcak to the game and enjoy the system.
• You'll have to do the above for each system. Happy hunting!

[hansolo77]

System Bezels.. why didn't I think of that?  Something new to play with.    I've been helping the RetroPie devs on testing out new features like Custom Systems and Last Played lists, etc.  Something I highly recommend is getting an account over at RetroAchievements and setting your system up to play games that support them.  It's a lot more fun!

As for MAME.. just get a version 0.78 set, use ClrMAMEPro and rebuild a merged set (not split or parent-clone).  Granted, you won't get a set that includes PacMan (rather it's PuckMan).  But, you'll be able to play about 99% of the games in the set, and you'll be able to scrape them too for all the pretty artwork metadata.

[RIP-Felix]

On 8/22/2017 at 5:34 PM, hansolo77 said:

System Bezels.. why didn't I think of that?  Something new to play with.    I've been helping the RetroPie devs on testing out new features like Custom Systems and Last Played lists, etc.  Something I highly recommend is getting an account over at RetroAchievements and setting your system up to play games that support them.  It's a lot more fun!

As for MAME.. just get a version 0.78 set, use ClrMAMEPro and rebuild a merged set (not split or parent-clone).  Granted, you won't get a set that includes PacMan (rather it's PuckMan).  But, you'll be able to play about 99% of the games in the set, and you'll be able to scrape them too for all the pretty artwork metadata.

Thanks, cool idea about retroachievments! I'll look into it.

Which mame emu should I put the roms into, "mame-mame4all", "mame-libretro", or do you recommend a different emu?

[Adultery]

I use the MAME4ALL core personally, and FBA core for NeoGeo. Runs most things pretty well on either one or the other on my Pi.

MAME is just to beefy for my tastes, but I also don't have a massive EHD like Han, and only use hand-picked ROMs.

And as if you needed a second endorsement, RetroAchievements are the shizz! Make sure you set it to use verbose logging, you get a notification before you start about how many achievements you have for that game/how many there are (You have 19 of 25 achievements).

I follow Han over there, like to see what he's playing. Add me to your friend list, eh? Adultery there too.

[hansolo77]

Yea, I've been playing some pinball games lately on the GBA.  Pacman Pinball and Mario Pinball Land.  I've got all but 1 achievement on Pacman's...  It's fun for sure.  Exposes me to games I'd never heard of or considered playing before. 

I used "mame-libretro" for my Arcade.  I liked the idea of a simplified controller, where everything libretro is run through RetroArch and therefore has automatically configured controllers based on what you set up in EmulationStation.

[RIP-Felix]

On 8/22/2017 at 5:34 PM, hansolo77 said:

...Something I highly recommend is getting an account over at RetroAchievements and setting your system up to play games that support them.  It's a lot more fun!...

 

14 hours ago, Adultery said:

...And as if you needed a second endorsement, RetroAchievements are the shizz! Make sure you set it to use verbose logging, you get a notification before you start about how many achievements you have for that game/how many there are (You have 19 of 25 achievements).

I follow Han over there, like to see what he's playing. Add me to your friend list, eh? Adultery there too.

As suggested...

RetroAchievements!!!

 

It's pretty easy to integrate and the video sums it up nicely.

My RetroAchievments handle is RIPFelix if you want to look me up. Question, is there a way to link my RetroAchievements to my signature ribbon (Before I had the forum stop showing them I saw many users had something like this below each post)? I never looked into it.

I'm running out of ideas for NEStalgia, which means I must be getting close to finished! Any more suggestions?

[hansolo77]

Depends on what you want to do.  There's always ports to play with, like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Cave Story, Super Mario War, Streets of Rage Remake, etc.  If you're not set up with it, scraping for video screenshots is nice.  Setting up a custom collection for achievements (my most recent addition) is nice if you're really interested in playing for them.

Something I'd like to get working is online play.  I'd hoped to be able to set something up so my brother and I could play 2 player games together even though we live in different states.

Lastly, don't forget about actually playing!  This is my crutch.  I'm always tweaking and adding, and fixing.  I'm never really playing, which is what the reason for building stuff like this is for.  So don't forget to do a bit of that! 

[RIP-Felix]

9 minutes ago, hansolo77 said:

...If you're not set up with it, scraping for video screenshots is nice...

That's intriguing, I'm currently only scraping boxart, but video clips would be way better! I wonder how much more space that would require? Thanks for the suggestion, keep'um coming!

Actually I want to get kodi integrated. So that's on the list of things to tackle. It's kinda pointless if I don't figure a network attached storage repository for my media. Currently they're just sitting on a 4TB HDD in my HTPC. I was thinking of making a Raspberry Pi3 based NAS for this purpose. That way I can point all the computers on my network to that, and have access to my media collection without the need for huge HDDs elsewhere. However, I've been sidetracked by other, more enticing projects (NEStalgia). And work, of course.

[hansolo77]

There are other uses for Kodi as well.  Photos, Music..  Movies and TV are a given, and you can even stream 99% of them from online without the need of local storage.  However, the local bit is a lot better as far as manageable quality and performance.  A NAS via RPi3 is an interesting idea.  I've seen people do that.  I went the other way.  BIG vs SMALL.  Full size 24-bay server with a mini rack.  But using a Pi would have advantages like power consumption.

As for video screenshots.  It depends.  I know in my case, I went and got a 1tb drive to play it safe. But it turned out to be overkill.  With my system now, complete romsets, and 90% scraped with videos, I still have something like 750gb free.  If you have a minimal system, using top 100 lists as you say, and cherry picked games you want, and not all available systems, you could probably get by fairly well.  A 32gb card might be all you need.

[RIP-Felix]

Well, I am using a 32GB SD, but the 26 PS1 games take the majority (15.7GB). I still have 11GB to work with, so the space for video previews is there. I want to add some more PS1 games and I still have MAME to think about. I will probably just do the Mame High score Games, after merging a set as you suggested with CMP. RetroAchievements needs a MAME high score feature. I hope they're working on it. It gets old fishing out the highscore screenshots out of mame, It would be great if it autopopulated on RetroAchievments.

[RIP-Felix]

Okay...having trouble figuring out how to get video snaps to work. I'm not sure where to put them. What I've gathered is they need to go into a snaps folder in the roms directory. Is that it? I read something about a needed xml or gameslist. I already have them scraped from emu movies for GameEX, so I don't want to go the Steven Selph's scraper method. This is mainly because I don't like his scraper has to be used without emulation station running and I can't choose them one by one, because it will probably make mistakes. Could someone point me in the right direction?