Retropie not saving Favorites upon reboot

mitu

@chrissyhemond It looks like either a permission problem or a bad gamelist.xml formatted file.
Try resetting the permissions on your ROMs folders - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/FAQ/#reset-ownershippermissions-of-homepiretropie-roms.

ChrissyHemond

Did not work :

Here is the message given to me when I quit emulsation :

lvl0 error parsing XML file "home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/n64/gamelist.xml"!
no document element found

lvl0 error parsing XML file "home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/retropie/gamelist.xml"!
no document element found

Ive manually deleted the items above, the error disappeared until i added new favorites.

mitu

@chrissyhemond said in Retropie not saving Favorites upon reboot:

home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/retropie/gamelist.xml

Seems like an empty file to me. Exit Emulationstation, then move the files where you get the errors out of the way, from the command line:

mv /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/retropie/gamelist.xml /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/retropie/gamelist.xml.bad
mv /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/n64/gamelist.xml /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/n64/gamelist.xml.bad

Restart the system and see if you get the same errors.

ChrissyHemond

@mitu

Cannot move "/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/n64/gamelist.xml to /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/n64/gamelist.xml.bad"
no such file or directory exist

mitu

@chrissyhemond Does the /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/folder exist ? Try running

ls -l /home/pi/.emulationstation/
ls -l /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/

and see what't the output. The command should give you also the permissions on the folders, if they're not owned by the pi user, then I recommend reinstalling Emulationstation from the RetroPie-Setup script.

ChrissyHemond

@mitu said in Retropie not saving Favorites upon reboot:

-l

Really sorry, yes it works, I then proceeded to redo what you've told me MV etc.

It works and yes the message is gone.

Unfortunately, if I add a game to my favorite and reset the favorite thingy, then proceed to leave emulationstation, the message comes back

ChrissyHemond

@mitu
what does it means when the text is red?

mitu

@chrissyhemond said in Retropie not saving Favorites upon reboot:

what does it means when the text is red?

If we're talking about the listing in the command line, it usually means a broken symlink, i.e. the file file is a shortcut to another file - but the target shortcut file doesn't exist anymore.

ChrissyHemond

@mitu
What can I do, if I move the said file with xml.bad as you told me, the moment i add a new favorite it justs come back the second i close emulationstation.

mitu

@chrissyhemond Did you try re-installing the Emulationstation package from the RetroPie-Setup script ?

ward614

A quick workaround for this is restarting emulation station rather than rebooting. The favorites save when you do and then you can reboot or turn off as usual.

ChrissyHemond

@mitu
I've done as you told me, I deleted it and re-installed it, it works now.
I can add favorites and they stay after shutdown.

Thanks a lot.

My question now, how do I remove a game for the gamelist / favorite without having to go in file manager ?
I can add a favorite, but I can't remove it, if I do remove it and I restart the emulationstation, it stays there.
The only way I've found to do things is to go in file manager and delete both gamelist.xml from retropie and SNES.

mitu

@chrissyhemond How are you removing the favorite flag ? It should be the same as adding it - pressing Y while the game is selected.

ChrissyHemond

@mitu
Yeah that's exactly what I do.
But upon reboot or reset of the emulationstation it doesn't disappear, it stays in the favorite.

I can add favorites, cannot remove them.

99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs.
Take one down, patch it around...
127 little bugs in the code.

mitu

@chrissyhemond It could be a bug, but that's not what I'm experiencing - I can reliably add/remove favorites and the list stays the same when restarting Emulationstation. It could be something in your particular configuration/system that triggers this bug.
Do you see any errors in /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt when you perform the actions ?

ChrissyHemond

@mitu
"Couldn't find entry in index! 1"
"Couldn't find entry in index! FALSE"
"Couldn't find entry in index! FALSE"
"Couldn't find entry in index! FALSE"

that's what's added when i remove a favorite to the log.

mitu

@chrissyhemond Can you post the gamelist.xml file or at least the section for the game where that you added as favorite ?

ChrissyHemond

@mitu
I'm not too sure how to do that

mitu

@chrissyhemond Use Winscp to login to the PI (details are in the https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Transferring-Roms page) and copy the /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/nes/gamelist.xml file to your pc.
Then paste the contents of the file to a site like pastebin.com and add the link in the topic post so we can take a look at it.

sscalley

I had basically the same issue. For me it was a permissions issue with the gamelist.xml that's automatically generated. Apr 14 v4.4 image.

I was getting an error that it couldn't save or write to /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/snes/gamelist.xml when I quit emulationstation to the command line. Can't recall the actual message now.

Anyway you can check the current permissions by changing directories to /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists and run the command
ls -Rl

For most of mine, but not all, the gamelist.xml was owned by root for the owner and group. While others were set to pi for the owner and group.

To update the permissions of all the gamelists to pi for the owner and group, while still in /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists you can run this command
sudo find ./ -name 'gamelist.xml' -exec chown pi:pi {} ;

There are other ways to accomplish this, but this was what I'm comfortable with. Hopefully there's no typo, I'm going off of memory and I'm just finding all named gamelist.xml starting from the current directory then changing the owner and group to pi.

As far as how this happened, I don't know. I built my own gamelists from a windows machine with images and videos. Placed the gamelists in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emaulation/gamelists/ and they all had owners and groups of pi. Loaded the ComicBook theme. The images/videos are aren't in the same directory as the roms, they hang off of /home/pi/RetroPie/. These are the only things I've done from a stock image with the exception of setting up a keyboard and PS4 controller.