Understanding gamelist.xml use?

[Agrajag]

I'm a bit confused by what I thought I knew and apparently what I actually know about gamelist.xml files.

I did some testing by editing a few entries in a couple platforms (Atari2600, NES and Arcade). Everything worked at expected and, with the Atari 2600 all entries have images (that were scraped) and I manually added video and marquees to a few. Awesome.

I then needed to redo my symlinks for some better simplicity as per a few other of my past posts here and Arcade didn't change at all, however, what changed is that the gamelist.xml file for Arcade (whose directory didn't change at all) is no longer paying any attention to this file (under emulationstation/configs/arcade), nor are any of my Favorites from Arcade showing up except those that I add now after this updating of symlinks. However, it doesn't seem to do anything with the existing gamelink.xml file. For example, 10-Yard Fight is listed as a Favorite (with its tag stating "True") and lists an image path, video path and marquee path, but none of them show up as they so recently just did and the entire Arcade game list is just a long list of rom names down the center of the screen in Showcase theme instead of the view you get when it sees images, etc.

Am I not understanding this file correctly? Shouldn't edits to this be reflected after a fresh boot and is this not the core location for this file?

Thanks.

(Raspberry Pi 4, 8GB RAM)

[mitu]

Most likely the .xml you created is not correct. If you look in the es_log.txt logfile (you can find it in \\retropie\configs\all\emulationstation) you'll see any errors from parsing the gamelist.xml (careful, not gamelink.xml).

Post the gamelist.xml on pastebin.com to take a look.