MiSTer FPGA: Loading games from the network/LAN

The default method of storing games on the MiSTer FPGA is by copying them to the SD Card. If you don’t have a large SD Card then that limits you to the amount of games you can store. You can plug a USB drive to store more games, but what if you don’t have an extra USB drive or don’t want to keep a minimalist setup with as little peripherals as possible. Well, you can mount network drives that can the MiSTer can directly play games from. This works over Wifi and Ethernet. This video shows you how.

SD Card Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
Network cable Image by Adrian Malec from Pixabay

How to create a user in Windows 10: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-a-local-user-or-administrator-account-in-windows-10-20de74e0-ac7f-3502-a866-32915af2a34d
How to create a user in Windows 7 & 8.1: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-a-user-account-in-windows-4fac6fd5-74c0-9737-69b8-6e77e00422dc#PickTab=Windows_7

I also use images from WikiCommons user Evan Amos. He takes high quality photos of consoles and accessories and puts them in the public domain. Even though they are public domain, I still want to give credit for his hard work.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Evan-Amos

Chapter:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Creating folders to share from your PC
2:20 Sharing the folders so the MiSTer can access them
3:44 Obtaining your PC’s IP address
4:14 Edit cifs_mount.sh script settings
6:07 Mounting network folders on the MiSTer FPGA
6:45 Testing playing games over the network
8:17 Speed comparisons between SD card, Ethernet and Wifi.
9:58 Testing AO486 disk images
11:46 Final Thoughts

source