Hi: two things, I wrote a small tool to generate a mame gamelist.xml from the mame exe, and setting games to hidden doesn't seem to work

[Mikerochip]

I wrote this: https://github.com/M1kerochip/CreateGameListFromMameXML

It's for (windows?) people who have an existing set of mame exe's, artwork, folders, dat files etc.

It's a windows exe that will generate a mame -listall .xml file,
open the file, parse it for the games list, add images from the mame snapshot etc directory, add videos from a video directory, read in the history.dat and mameinfo.dat and add that as the description, add a marquee from the marquee directory, set a genre from a category.ini/genre.ini etc, add a rating if you have one, set favourite to true if you have a favourite list.

It will generate a full gamelist from the xml, or optionally only include rom files from a specific directory.

It seems to work quite well at the moment.

But, thinking about how I could make it better, I added code to hide: bios, mechanical, device and non runnable roms/systems.
ie setting the <hidden> tag to true.

But, this doesn't seem to work.

I understand that it won't work in Full mode, but it also doesn't seem to work in Kiosk or Kid mode.

Would it be possible, too, to add a --fullUI or similar argument?

It makes more sense to leave ES in Kiosk mode, and only when needed, start it in Full mode, rather than leaving it on full mode and only running --kiosk via the command line.

I designed the program to work with the existing mame assets, from various sources.
So, if you have your mame rom images in a folder, and have dat files from Arcade History, and mameinfo etc, and then folder.ini files from AntoPISA, and artwork/screenshots/title screens etc from AntoPISA too, you can use those assets rather than having to re-scrape etc every time there's a new (monthly) release of MAME.

If I leave all games to not hidden, and just use the tool to generate a merged rom set xml, there's 12,670 or so items.
If I hide mechanical, screenless, bios, non runnable and device sets, then about 5,700 or so sets get set to hidden.
(But obviously, are still visible in the front end)

[mitu]

So if I understand correctly, EmulationStation is configured to use the Kiosk UI mode, but the ROMs marked as 'hidden' are still showing ? What version of RetroPie/EmulationStation are you using ?

[Mikerochip]

@mitu Yes, correct.

I'm using this:
https://github.com/jrassa/EmulationStation/releases/tag/continuous-master
Latest build as of when it was updated last. (Few weeks ago, I think).

I opened an issue on github, but there was a note to post here first.

And, just to say too, you can go into the game in Full UI mode, and ES correctly shows it as hidden.

[mitu]

Can't reproduce this with the current EmulationStation version. If the game has a corresponding

<hidden>true</hidden>

node, then it's not shown in Kiosk UI mode. Check if the gamelist.xml is correctly generated and EmulationStation loads the generated gamelist and not another gamelist from another location.

[Mikerochip]

Hi,
yeah, it's definitely the correct gamelist.xml

I switched on my PC today, and the problem remained.
So, in an effort to find the exact sequence to trigger this, I built a test .emulationstation folder from scratch. 3 roms, 1 system, 1 hidden rom.

And, it worked perfectly. <hidden>true</hidden> tags hid the one hidden rom.
So, I put back my original .emulationstation folder.

And, now, <hidden> works fine for me.

No other changes were made. (I renamed the folder, and just named it back)
So.
Not sure what to say to you guys now!

If I can reproduce it in future, I'll note how I did it.
Some of the time in the last day or two, I enabled Kiosk sometimes via the UI, and sometimes by editing the .cfg file by hand.
I didn't think ES wrote any changes apart from into the .emulationstation folder.
Each time though, like I said, I could see <hidden> was true in the entry, in Full mode.
And Kiosk was enabled properly, since I couldn't make any UI changes.

In my software, I'm going to add support for hiding certain genre's, and that should complete the work on it for the time being, I think.