The store could only offer what an emulator boots, which meant cartridges
and nothing else — a little under half the catalog. Batocera runs Linux
and its Ports system takes .sh launchers, so a native build can be
installed too; it just is not a ROM.
`install: "port"` unpacks the zip, finds the executable and writes a
launcher that cd's into its directory first, because a game loads assets
relative to the working directory. Python's extraction drops the
executable bit, so it is restored from the mode the archive records.
The payload lives under ports/.data/<subfolder>/, whose leading dot is
what hides it from EmulationStation, while the launchers sit in a normal
subfolder that gets scanned like any other system's. Both carry the store
subfolder, so an uninstall or prune cannot reach another store's files —
verified by pointing a state entry at a foreign namespace and watching it
be refused.
Verified end to end on aarch64 against the live catalog: bevydemo
installs as a port with an executable launcher and binary, re-syncs
without re-downloading 29 MB, and uninstalls taking its 106 MB payload
with it. `install` defaults to rom, so existing configs are unaffected.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
mr.zeroandClaude Opus 5