Preparation

Preparation

Before you start using RCB you should make sure that you have everything prepared. Minimum requirement for using RCB is that you have some games on your hard drive. No Rom Collection Browser without roms. You won't need any game info or artwork, RCB can grab it online for you. Since Kodi 18 you won't even need an emulator for some supported platforms. So, here is what you need to have fun with RCB:

What you will need

• Roms/Games
• Emulators (optional)
• Artwork (optional)
• Videos (optional)

Recommended folder structure

There are several ways how you can organize your games and artwork on your disk. It is highly recommended that you store your rom files separated on a per platform basis. I would also recommend that you separate rom files from artwork/video files.

A typical folder structure might look like this:

games
	snes
		roms
		artwork
	n64
		roms
		artwork

The rom folders should contain your rom files. The artwork folders can be empty at the beginning or contain artwork that you already have on your hd.

Emulators

If you want to launch your roms with an external emulator, you will need to install one or more emulators on your system. RCB will call your emulator per command line. So, before you start setting up your emulator in RCB you should find out how to do this outside RCB. Some emulators just require the path to the rom file, others might be more demanding. For some systems and platforms RCB provides autoconfig support. This means that RCB tries to suggest the correct parameters for the most common emulators. Right now, autoconfig support is limited to Mac and Android. Windows and Linux should follow with later releases.

Artwork

When you do not have any artwork for your games available, you just need one empty artwork folder per platform. RCB will create the required subfolders (boxfront, screenshot, ...) automatically and fill these folders with artwork during the scrape process. RCB will create all required folders at once even if this type of artwork can not be downloaded during scrape process.

If you already have artwork for your games on your hd, you can tell RCB the paths to your artwork folders during setup process or later in Edit Rom Collection dialog.

In both scenarios you can put new artwork files in these folders at any time. RCB should detect and display these files on next launch. You just need to make sure that the filenames of your artwork files match the filenames of your rom files (excluding disc indicators).

So, if you have rom files named like this:

mygame1.n64
mygame2.sfc
mygame3 (USA).zip
mygame4 (disc 1 of 2).zip

your corresponding artwork files should be named like this:

mygame1.png
mygame2.png
mygame3 (USA).png
mygame4.png

Videos

Videos are handled like other artwork files. With the difference that there is no online scraper available for video files. See How to add videos to your Rom Collection for more information.