Make an entire sub folder hidden?

tackett1980

I’ve been organizing my massive .78 mame rom packs into subfolders and it’s working out well.

I currently have the following structure:

Beat em ups
Shoot em ups
Run n gun
Sports
Vertical games
Fighting
Puzzle
Platforms
All Other Games

I really would like to set the “all other games” folder to hidden so it appears when in full UI and disappears in kiosk mode. However to do this it seems like I have to click each individual rom inside that folder and go through the meta data and set each one to hidden one, at,a,time....

With 4k+ roms it’s going to be near impossible to do that.

I tried to do it by navigating to the meta data option on the sub folder itself but the hidden off/on option isn’t there like it is when you are doing it to an actual rom.

tpo1990

@tackett1980 Why not just use custom collections?

Custom collections is a lot easier to manage and you can name them anything you like. You can even back them up since they are .cfg files and then restore them anytime from like a USB drive.

This is taken from help and support:
The custom collections are configured in /home/pi/. emulationstation/collections . If you have a <collection>. cfg file that contains all the ROM paths you want in the collection, just copy it there, restart ES, then choose to display the collection in the ES config menu.

tackett1980

@tpo1990

Well the custom collection is nice but it doesn’t really fit my needs for a few different reasons.

1: I started out doing it this way but it kind of makes the issue worse. To hide the default “arcade” heading and just see the custom collection instead I would not only have to individually hide each rom, I would have to write down all the roms that I put in the custom collection and make sure I skipped those.

2: I don’t really need a new section or collection. “Arcade” is really want I want to see anyway. My objective is organization of the arcade roms under the “arcade” heading. I want to have the most known and popular arcade games separated into genres, then have the rest of them present and accessible if you really want to see them.

3: the first time I spent hours making a custom collection, I then updated retropie, restarted the software and when it came back on that custom collection was deleted. So I don’t want to run the risk of that happening again, and as mentioned it really doesn’t fit my need here exactly anyway. Though it is a great feature.

Basically, my man cave gets a lot of traffic. From friends to the kids and family. I really want this setup pretty foolproof and I’m making progress thanks to the community. I’m just planning for that eventuality when someone comes over and says man “I used to play xxx” game growing up it’s too bad you don’t have it. Then I can say “let’s check the full list for it.” ^^vv<><>BA “Here it is!”

So basically, being able to hide the entire sub folder is what would serve my needs the best, and it can be done for sure, but it would be nice if I could do it without having to change the metadata of 4k roms individually.

tpo1990

Ah, I see why it is not the best option for you.

Well the only thing i know of would be to create a subfolders inside of each rom folder for the types of games you want to see such as "Fighting" and then it would show up in Emulationstation. With this you could also just create a subfolder and name it "All Games" and then place all the games that you don't want to see. But that will still not hide it completely.

Another approach i can think of would be to manually create a new system for Emulationstation and then name it something like Arcade Classics or Top Games, but that will add another system to the list. For this you will need to manually edit the themes files that you use for your RetroPie setup.

For custom collections, I have not experienced that they would be deleted after updating RetroPie. Maybe you were unlucky at the time or otherwise they are still there in RetroPie somewhere in the file system. What I have done is manually created my own USB Backup and Restore script for saves and custom collections and it works really well. That way I will always have a backup available.

tackett1980

@tpo1990

How about editing multiple game metadata at once.

Then I could just use kid mode.

I’d have to be able to bulk edit the metadata though because that still puts me at editing like 4500 roms individually.

tpo1990

@tackett1980 I don't think such option exist, well at least if it does it would be something like the scrapers can do. Maybe the scraping program called Skraper can help you. That is the one i use for scraping roms. It collects data from screenscraper.fr scraping database.

Otherwise i don't know any other options, but maybe someone else here does.