Retroarch on Android (SD card issue)

[Divineheresy88]

Hey all

I've tried to reach out to Retroarch and they've yet to get back to me. I've got an S20 ultra that I wanna use as an emualtion phone but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to make my SD card show up on Retroarch; any other emulators I use doesn't seem to have this issue.

Anyone know what's going on with retroarch?

Ty!

 

[yuyuyup]

maybe it's a "scoped storage" issue, looks like it was fixed in February, did you install the latest build? "Scoped storage" introduced in Android 11

 

[Divineheresy88]

maybe it's a "scoped storage" issue, looks like it was fixed in February, did you install the latest build? "Scoped storage" introduced in Android 11

I believe I have but i'll do an uninstall/reinstall of the latest versions to see if anything changes.

 

[Divineheresy88]

Uninstalled/reinstalled and it did ask permission but still I don't see any way to view my SD card via retroarch

 

[yuyuyup]

Uninstalled/reinstalled and it did ask permission but still I don't see any way to view my SD card via retroarch

Sorry, I should have suggested try that "nightly" version with the fix, it might not be implemented in the normal release yet from what I can tell (this might be the case since this fix is fairly recent.)

 

[JuanMena]

One: Using newer versions of RetroArch does not mean that it's exclusive to use new version of cores.
You can totally use older versions of RetroArch and download current cores.

Two: RetroArch on mobile is a bit funky. It won't show directories as a computer does. Intead it'll show something like: storage/internalSD
or
storage/externalSD

(or something along those lines, can't remember as I only used RA on mobile once)

So be sure that "externalSD" is actually showing up in your directories.

 

[hooky1992]

found a fix !! it seems the last few version of Android have tightened up permissions regarding SD card access, as my ancient Samsung tablet can access the SD card via Retroarch where as my new Samsung phone cannot.

In a nutshell, we must modify a Retroarch config file to point to the folder path for the SD card so it can be found easily via the "Start Directory". I have found a video online (embedded below) but I will set out step by step here too incase its ever taken down ...

• first off open Retroarch on your phone, navigate to Configuration File, then click Save New Configuration
• open the Google Play store on your phone and install an app named QuickEdit Text Editor (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rhmsoft.edit), which we will use to modify the config file we just created
• open QuickEdit Text Editor, then click the three dots in the top right, then click the SD card menu item
• this will then display the unique identifier code Android system uses for your SD Card, which in the image below is 730D-1701

• take note of the SD Card unique identifier code, then navigate to the new config file you just made, which will be the .cfg file with the current date in Internal Storage > RetroArch > Config

• tap the .cfg file and it will open on screen, then click the 3 dots in the top right, click Search, then enter rgui_browser and click SEARCH again

• it will then navigate to the line in the .cfg file with that begins with that value, which is infact rgui_browser_directory with a value equal to "default"

• we must change this to whatever our SD Card folder path is, which would be "/storage/730D-1701"
• if, like me, you have your games stored in a folder called "roms", we can add that instead, which would give a new value of "/storage/730D-1701/roms"

• after you have modified the text, click the floppy disk icon second from right to Save your changes
• open Retroarch, navigate to Configuration File, then click Load Configuration
• click the .cfg file you have just modified

• you will be brought back out to the Main Menu automatically after clicking
• click Load Content, then click Start Directory
• you will then see the contents of your "rom" folder on your SD Drive, or where ever you pointed rgui_browser_directory to

here is the video

 

[hooky1992]

update .... an even better fix is to uninstall the Retroarch app on your phone that was installed from the Android store and download & install the latest version of the APK directly from the Retroarch website instead, as I discovered while trying to get the new Emulation Station app working ! Of course the app hosted on the website does not have to go through the various permissions checks enforced by the Android store, therefore it can access the SD Card with no issues

 

[KurtVicious]

This doesn't seem to work with usb drives as I'm trying to use A USB SSD. Its identifier looks like this:
"mnt/media_rw/xxxx-xxxx" instead of how android sees SD cards as "storage".

 

[jalaneme]

This doesn't seem to work with usb drives as I'm trying to use A USB SSD. Its identifier looks like this:
"mnt/media_rw/xxxx-xxxx" instead of how android sees SD cards as "storage".

Same issue here with my phone and and SSD drive also, I still can't select the roms if anyone has a updated fix for Android 16 and above, please share thx.