Boot Chameleon from USB

[andylong]

Chameleon, as many of you know, is a great project for the Raspberry Pi. It's a wonderful OS packed with multiple emulators for all sorts of gaming endeavors. This is how I managed to properly run Chameleon from a USB flash drive.

Requirements:

• Raspberry Pi (I am using Model B).
  SD Card (I used a 2GB).
  USB flash drive (I used a cheap 8GB one from Wal-Mart).
  Chameleon v031 image.
  Raspbian (wheezy) image.

I downloaded the image and was ready to write it to my SD card -- and then I realized that the image was nearly twice the size of the SD card I was trying to boot from! I was lost, completely hopeless in my efforts of playing Super Nintendo without owning a working console.

It was then that I remembered using Berryboot, and the seed was planted: I would attempt installing Chameleon onto an 8GB flash drive I had laying around, and would boot it using Berryboot from the SD card.

Roadblock. Berryboot needs the images to be SquashFS, which Chameleon is not. I eventually found a precompiled SquashFS image for Chameleon and attempted to use it. I ran through the process of installing it to the flash drive, rebooted, and...success!

...or so I thought. Not a single emulator would work, and the whole thing was rather buggy. I was not satisfied, and I was determined to find a way to run Chameleon off of USB.

I finally managed to come up with a workaround, and I am now sharing it with you. Luckily, all the information I needed was readily available on the internet. It just took some digging and nail-biting to make it all work.

Instructions:

• 1. I downloaded Chameleon v031, unzipped it, and flashed it to my USB drive using 'dd' in Ubuntu.
  
  2. I downloaded the Raspbian (wheezy) image and flashed it to the SD card, also using 'dd' in Ubuntu.
  
  3. I deleted all files in the boot partition (inside the /boot folder) on the SD.
  
  4. I then copied the boot partition (the files in /boot on the flash drive) from the Chameleon USB drive onto the Raspbian SD card.
  
  5. Then, I opened 'cmdline.txt' in the boot partition of the SD card and completely erased the contents of the file. I replaced it with the following line of code:
  

  dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait text

  NOTE: I initially used /dev/sda1 in the code, but was unable to successfully boot, as the Pi would halt when attempting to find the USB drive. I then realized that Chameleon does not use two partitions, but three, since it is not SquashFS. I decided to attempt using /dev/sda2 instead and was successful. Change this if you don't have any luck.
  
  6. After saving my changes, I ejected both the SD card and flash drive, plugged them into the Pi, powered it up, and within several seconds I was greeted with the beautiful Chameleon boot screen. Within a minute or so, I was running a fully functional RPIChameleon from USB.

Bear in mind: to boot to Chameleon, both the flash drive and the SD card must be plugged in when you power on the Pi.

I have had no problems with this configuration as of yet, and am quite pleased with how this thing is operating. I hope other people have success with this method as well!


Credit: I loosely used the steps from http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/qu ... tick-drive in order to make this possible.

[mni]

I signed up just to thank you for this thread.

This is exactly what I was looking for.

[andylong]

Well, you're very welcome! I'm glad someone was able to put this to some use!