Symbolic links
Store your games in a different folder
Using Symbolic links is a solution provided natively in Windows that allows you point a logical folder to a folder stored on another place on your computer.
How is this interesting for Retrobat ?
The whole point of this feature is to allow you to physically store your roms in a different place than the standard \retrobat\roms\ folder, for example you could store them on a separate Hard Drive which has a bigger storage size.
Example:
To create a symbolic link in Windows, you can either use command lines in the console, or use a tool called "Link Shell Extension". The method described hereafter is the method with usage of this tool.
The program can be downloaded from the following website : https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html#download
Once installed, you need to reboot your computer or to close and restart the "explorer.exe" process.
Once done, new options will appear in the right-click context menu:
- Pick Link Source
- Drop As...
In the next example, we will suppose that you are storing your 3do game ROMs in
D:\Retrobat\3do and that you Retrobat installation folder is C:\Retrobat.- 1.Ensure all your roms are properly copied to
D:\Retrobat\3doand that yourC:\Retrobat\roms\3dodoes not contain any important data you need to keep - 2.Delete the
C:\Retrobat\roms\3dofolder - 3.Right-click on the
D:\Retrobat\3dofolder and select "Pick Link Source" - 4.Go to the
C:\Retrobat\romsfolder, right-click anywhere inside the folder and select "Drop As... > Symbolic Link" - 5.Your
C:\Retrobat\romsfolder will now show a 3do folder icon with a small arrow
CONGRATULATIONS : you have just created a symbolic link !
You can now repeat this operation for any folder that you would want to store in another place as the default one.
Let's use the same example as before and try to perform the Symlink creation manually.
- 1.sure all your roms are properly copied to
D:\Retrobat\3doand that yourC:\Retrobat\roms\3dodoes not contain any important data you need to keep - 2.Delete the
C:\Retrobat\roms\3dofolder - 3.Open Windows command and type the following command:
mklink /D "C:\Retrobat\roms\3do" "D:\Retrobat\3do - 4.Your
C:\Retrobat\romsfolder will now show a 3do folder icon with a small arrow
