If you have both RetroPie and XBMC/Kodi on your RaspberryPi it would be helpful if you can switch between the two easily. The best thing to do is to add a new tab in EmulationStation so that when you are done playing games you can switch to XBMC to watch a movie!
Update 2/13/15: If you have the newer version of XBMC which is now called Kodi then all the steps are identical; the only thing that would change is the line to load the program. The steps below reflect the new changes showing you both ways to do set this up!
The steps are easier than you think so lets started
pi@raspberry ~ $ cd .emulationstation pi@raspberry ~/.emulationstation $ sudo nano es_systems.cfg |
Scroll to the bottom and right before the last line
</systemList> |
add the following lines:
<system> <fullname>XBMC</fullname> </system> |
What this will do is:
- Enable EmulationStation to add a new XBMC tab.
- Have it look in the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/xbmc directory (That will be made next.).
- Have it only show programs with the .sh file extension.
- Have the tab have the same theme as the esconfig tab (Which isn’t loaded anyway.).
Save and exit with:
Ctrl+x Y Enter |
Once that is done I made the ‘xbmc‘ directory and then went into it with:
pi@raspberry ~/.emulationstation $ cd pi@raspberry ~ $ cd RetroPie/roms pi@raspberry ~/RetroPie/roms $ mkdir xbmc pi@raspberry ~/RetroPie/roms $ cd xbmc |
I then made a simple bash program that will load xbmc:
pi@raspberry ~/RetroPie/roms/xbmc $ nano xbmc.sh |
In this new document I added the following:
#!/bin/bash sudo xbmc -fs |
Or if you have XBMC/Kodi use:
#!/bin/bash sudo kodi |
Save and exit and them make it executable with:
pi@raspberry ~/RetroPie/roms/xbmc $ chmod +x xbmc.sh |
Go back and load EmulationStation
pi@raspberry ~/RetroPie/roms/xbmc $ cd pi@raspberry ~ $ emulationstation |
and when you scroll to the left one tab you should see the new XBMC tab with just a white background, open it up and you’ll see the program that was just created, and if you open it then it will load up XBMC!
The theme is very basic and in the future I will work on and change the theme to make it fit in more with the rest of EmulationStation! Look forward to that post too!
Check out the other posts in this series:
Installing XBMC/Kodi on RaspberryPi
Basic XBMC/Kodi Settings
Adding a XBMC/Kodi tab in EmulationStation