Custom Collections - Subfolders?

[kafka_esq]

Hi, I am sorry if this is in the documentation somewhere but I have so far come up empty-handed.

I am trying to set up my retropie with smokemonster's everdrive organization structure (not talking about the rom packs themselves, but the way they are sorted in various subfolders, etc.), but I don't want to have duplicates (and break savegames, for that matter).

So, the most elegant solution in my mind is to have my main USA roms in their respective folders (standard setup), and then theme a custom collection for each everdrive pack (sd2snes for instance) so that I could have an organized file structure like below without any duplicate rom files or mismatched savegames:

[SD2NES COLLECTION]
--Best-Of Lists
----7 Great Non-US Games - Destructoid.com
----Best Japan-Only Games - Michibiku.com
----Best RPGs - Racketboy.com
----Best Shoot 'Em Ups - Game Sack (YouTube)
----Games That Defined the SNES - Racketboy.com
------Honorable Mentions
----Games That Pushed the Hardware Limits - Racketboy.com
------Honorable Mentions
------Nintendo SNES Classic Games
--------Super Famicom Classic Exclusives
----The 25 Most Underrated Games - DenOfGeek.com
(etc.)

Is it possible to have subfolders within custom collections that contain multiple instances of the same rom (without duplicating the rom file)? I am still kind of new at this but I am willing to learn, I just want to know if this is possible or if I am going to have to find another way.

My end goal is have all roms in their respective system folders alphabetically with a separate system icon for each everdrive pack and then subfolders that match the file structure of Smokemonster's packs, but no duplicate rom files and only one custom collection system icon per pack.

Is this even possible?

[pjft]

You can have multiple instances of the same rom within multiple collections, but you can't have subfolders within collections.

You can group them all as subfolders within the "My Collections" folder, but there's only 1-level depth.

I don't think that the exact use case you're going for is possible at the moment with the built-in ES capabilities. You might be better off just trying to use symlinks to the roms and the alternative collections method based on symlinks that was also discussed in the forums back in the day.

Best.

[kafka_esq]

@pjft

Thank you for the reply. I'll look into that symlink option - Do you know if save files still work properly with those? I'm assuming once we're in the core the system recognizes that the rom is running from its actual location and not its shortcut, right? What about artwork scraping? If i have to rescrape, can I just make a symlink to the media folder so I only need another gamelist without having to duplicate game artwork?

considering just organizing it a bit differently to work with the nesting limitations - Do you mind describing how I'd go about adding a single folder to a custom collection to get that one-level-deep file structure you were talking about? I've only seen info on how to set up individual games in custom collections.

Sorry for all the questions. Still slowly becoming a bit less of a space-cadet with this stuff.

[kafka_esq]

@pjft Would it be possible to write a batch script or something that could be run once to simply and easily categorize large quantities of roms without duplication?

My idea is something that works like this. It 'feels' like it would be easy for someone who does these sorts of things, but I know nothing so I could be very wrong.

in '/roms/nes' you make the directory 'Top 50' (or subcategorize by genre, etc.)
You move your top 50 roms from '/roms/nes' to /roms/nes/Top 50'
You put the 'categorize_roms.bat' into '/roms/nes/Top 50' and run it

The .bat file would then take all the roms in the folder, move them back up to '/roms/nes' and replace them with symlinks to each rom in the subfolder.

Obviously replace .bat with whatever kind of script you prefer - I'm working with limited knowledge here.

Is this doable?