If you own a Freebox with a built-in hard drive (Révolution, Delta, Pop, Ultra…), it can act as a NAS for your Recalbox: roms, saves and BIOS stay on the router and the SD card only holds the system. This page details the whole procedure; the general mechanism is described in Loading roms from a network share.
The Freebox is an Internet router distributed in France only. Requirements: a Freebox with a hard drive, a Recalbox connected over Ethernet, and a computer to edit the configuration file.
Paramètres de la Freebox (Freebox settings).Mode avancé > Partage de fichiers > Partage Windows.You can leave access unauthenticated (the simplest option: we will use guest), or require authentication — in that case, replace guest below with username=your_login,password=your_password.
📷 Screenshot to come:
freebox-partage-windows.png
Still in the Freebox interface, go to Paramètres > Mode avancé > Réseau local > Mode réseau and note the IP address of the Freebox Server — usually 192.168.0.254 or 192.168.1.254.
Open the Explorateur de fichiers application of the Freebox interface and note the exact name of the hard drive.
Respect uppercase and lowercase strictly, and avoid drive or folder names containing a space: the mount would fail.
Still in the Freebox file explorer:
recalbox folder at the root of the hard drive.roms, bios and saves.roms one subfolder per emulated system (snes, megadrive…), or copy the existing structure of your Recalbox straight into it.📷 Screenshot to come:
freebox-dossiers-recalbox.png
RECALBOX (the only partition visible under Windows).recalbox-boot.conf file with a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++…).;sharenetwork_smb=SHARE@192.168.0.1:Documents/recalbox:guest line with the following lines:sharedevice=NETWORK
sharewait=30
sharenetwork_smb1=ROMS@FREEBOX_IP:DRIVE_NAME/recalbox/roms:guest,vers=3.0
sharenetwork_smb2=BIOS@FREEBOX_IP:DRIVE_NAME/recalbox/bios:guest,vers=3.0
sharenetwork_smb3=SAVES@FREEBOX_IP:DRIVE_NAME/recalbox/saves:guest,vers=3.0
FREEBOX_IP and DRIVE_NAME with the values noted in step 1.With a Freebox at 192.168.1.254 and a drive named Freebox, this gives:
sharedevice=NETWORK
sharewait=30
sharenetwork_smb1=ROMS@192.168.1.254:Freebox/recalbox/roms:guest,vers=3.0
sharenetwork_smb2=BIOS@192.168.1.254:Freebox/recalbox/bios:guest,vers=3.0
sharenetwork_smb3=SAVES@192.168.1.254:Freebox/recalbox/saves:guest,vers=3.0
Keep
vers=3.0: version 1 of the SMB protocol crashes the Freebox, on top of being obsolete and insecure.
Boot takes a little longer than usual, the time for the mounts to be established. Once the interface shows up, your games stored on the Freebox appear.
Connect to the Recalbox over SSH and look at the mount log:
cat /tmp/mountNetwork.log
Check first the exact drive name (including capitals), the absence of spaces in folder names, and the router IP address.
Need help? Join the Recalbox Discord.