[rockbox948]

I'm loving the fact that I can play my retro games on Kodi! However, while I have been able to get NES and SNES to work, none of the Genesis games will. I'm using .md files and have tried all of the Sega emulators available with Kodi to no avail. Each time, I get an error saying, "The game can only be played directly from a hard drive or partition. Compressed files must be extracted."
Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong? I've tried this with Kodi 18.9 and 19.3.

[garbear]

Glad you're exploring retroplayer! The error message is because the game is on a network drive. We have a "VFS" (virtual filesystem) that lets us use basically anything to provide files. However, only some libretro cores are compatible with our VFS. You can see the full list here: https://kodi.wiki/view/Game_add-ons . If a core doesn't support VFS, it can only load game files from a local partition.

If your core doesn't support VFS, I suggest you try moving the ROM files to a local hard drive partition and see if that works. If not, please post a debug log. Debug logs usually give me enough information to see the problem directly.

[rockbox948]

Thanks, moving the files to the FireTV did the trick!  I appreciate the help and especially all of the work that has been done to bring gaming to Kodi!

Is the VFS compatibility issue a permanent one or is it something that might eventually have a workaround?

[garbear]

Is the VFS compatibility issue a permanent one or is it something that might eventually have a workaround?

VFS compatibility is a completeness issue. Libretro did the Herculean effort of porting all cores to their C API, which often requires rewriting code in the emulator. If a core doesn't support VFS, it's because no one has rewritten filesystem handling part yet. The workaround is known as a volunteer 

[rockbox948]

Good to know🙂  If only I had the coding skills to help out...