Emulationstation Sortname Metadata

[joemommasfat]

A little while back, I made a modification to Emulationstation to allow for a "sortname" entry in the gamelist.xml for games like Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat 3, or the Spyro series, which aren't necessarily ordered 1,2,3 when sorted by title.

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/commit/ed2511e215560e0c47681d61ef1068eda711142e

The commit was accepted into the master branch, but has not made it into the stable branch that retropie uses with its scripts. This is a feature I would really like in the standard branch, and I was wondering if there was a procedure for updating the stable branch? I'd be happy to work on that. Are we expecting master to be merged into stable in the near future?

My second question is for @muldjord. If this does get into the default branch, would it be something that could be added to the text import of skyscraper?

like:

<game>
  <title>Final Fantasy VII</title>
  <sortname>Final Fantasy 7</sortname>
</game>
<game>
  <title>Final Fantasy IX</title>
  <sortname>Final Fantasy 9</sortname>
</game>

[muldjord]

@joemommasfat I just implemented a feature recently that will now preserve the extra data from the gamelist.xml data (not released yet, but can be tested on the 'master' branch if people are curious). I will add the <sortname>to the nodes that should be preserved (EDIT: Done, it will be in 2.8.0). That way it won't be erased for games that already exist when rewriting the gamelist.xml. The only caveat to this is that it preserves the nodes by comparing the <path> filename to the rom filenames and if they match it will be preserved for that game. But if you either change the <path>or filename of a rom manually, they won't match and the extra information will not be moved over when regenerating the xml. So users should be aware of that.