[Wintermute0110]

I'm still reading about the Game stuff and it's difficult to find good info that are not the specific Retroplayer Builds. There is no emulators on the Game sections of a Leia from the PPA.

Are the libretro addons going to be available on the PPA?

Thanks!

In order to play games you need Kodi Leia 18.0 (or a RC version, not recommended), a gamepad (keyboard doesn't work at the moment), the binary addon game.libretro and one or more libretro cores, which are binary addons. The libretro core binary addons are named game.libretro.*, for example game.libretro.genplus. You also need the addons game.controller.* but you can install those from the Kodi addon manager (they are not binary addons, they are data-only addons and platform independent). You can see a list of the available libretro cores here, look for the game.libretro.* addons.

For some reason, the binary addons in the Team Kodi PPA include the screensavers, audio decoder/encoders, visualizations, but no trace of the game binary addons. I'm sure they are working on packaging them but I cannot tell you when they will be available in the PPA. Note that I am not part of Team Kodi, I am just the developer of the Advanced Launcher addons.

This is the reason I decided to create the Kodi compilation scripts in Linux offered in this thread. Contrary to other operating systems, in Linux you have easy access to the building tools and hence it is relatively simple to get the source code and compile Kodi and the binary addons yourself. In addition, I spend some time writing a good documentation in Github that I will update over time (link in the first post) so any user that wants to use Kodi Leia Retroplayer on Linux can try it in a way as easy as possible.

Once you have at least one libretro core binary addon installed and enabled, then go to the Games section in the Home window and add a directory as a games source. Retroplayer requires uncompressed ROMs (*). After you install a libretro core binary addon, the ROM extensions it supports become available in the games source. For example, if you have the ROM Sonic The Hedgehog.md, after you install the core game.libretro.genplus which supports the extension md, you will be able to see the ROM file in the games source and play it.

Note that game support in Leia has many bugs and unimplemented features. However, the more the number of users the better the bug reports and the devs have more information to get a more polished version in the future.

If you want I can write a more complete tutorial about how to use Retroplayer in Linux.

(*) This is partially true. Some cores support playing ROMs inside ZIP files, others don't. So the safe way is to have all ROMs uncompressed.