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symbolic-links.md

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Store your games in a different folder

Symbolic links

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:

Creating a symbolic link

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.

Download Link Shell Extension

The program can be downloaded from the following website : https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html#download

Use Link Shell Extension

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...

Create a symbolic link with Link Shell Extension

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\3do and that your C:\Retrobat\roms\3do does not contain any important data you need to keep
  2. Delete the C:\Retrobat\roms\3do folder
  3. Right-click on the D:\Retrobat\3do folder and select "Pick Link Source"
  4. Go to the C:\Retrobat\roms folder, right-click anywhere inside the folder and select "Drop As... > Symbolic Link"
  5. Your C:\Retrobat\roms folder 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.

Create a symbolic link with native Windows command

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\3do and that your C:\Retrobat\roms\3do does not contain any important data you need to keep
  2. Delete the C:\Retrobat\roms\3do folder
  3. Open Windows command and type the following command: mklink /D "C:\Retrobat\roms\3do" "D:\Retrobat\3do
  4. Your C:\Retrobat\roms folder will now show a 3do folder icon with a small arrow