Separating ROM categories?

Amishgamer

Hello all,

Forgive me if this is obvious, but my searching for this answer has been fruitless.

I started out with images made by others, such as PiPiggies. Those images always seemed to have collections separated, such as separate entries for MSX and MSX2, PSP and PSPminis, Megadrive and Megadrive from Japan, etc.

Now that I started fresh, and building my own image, for the life of me I can't find instructions how to recreate this. The wiki for each of these emulators seem to say that they're all one thing, and I should just combined the roms in one folder (i.e. both MSX and MSX2 roms in the same folder)

Is there a good tut out there to explain how to separate these for purposes of sorting? Thanks in advance.

pjft

@amishgamer I'm not an expert on that, but it will require editing the /home/pi/. emulationstation/es_systems.cfg file to create your individual folders for those split systems.

Unsure whether there are specific guides on doing exactly that but there's plenty of people doing so in the forums.

simonster

Check out the Emulation Station pages in the Wiki: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/ there is a breakdown of how the systems are defined in the config files in here.

meleu

@amishgamer said in Separating ROM categories?:

Is there a good tut out there to explain how to separate these for purposes of sorting?

I tried something similar to what you want here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/84125

I'm not sure, but I think that the guy behind what you saw is @dmmarti , and he shared his code in this post here. But it's not a tutorial, it's the source code.

dmmarti

@simonster said in Separating ROM categories?:

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/

I've never really seen a full blown tutorial on how to do it .. as there's a few different ways to accomplish it ....some more detailed than others. Most of the time when you see them split out, the person who made the image did alot of reading and tinkering to figure it all out.....

easy method

Let's take "PC ENGINE" and "TurboGrafx-16" as examples. They both use the same emulator .. but let's say you want them in different folders.

First thing is you have to define the TurboGrafx-16 as it's own system within the es_sytems.cfg file.

Here are the two entries in the file you'd have.

<system>
<name>pcengine</name>
<fullname>PC Engine</fullname>
<path>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/pcengine</path>
<extension>.pce .ccd .cue .zip .PCE .CCD .CUE .ZIP</extension>
<command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 SYS pcengine %ROM%</command>
<platform>pcengine</platform>
<theme>pcengine</theme>
</system>
<system>
<name>tg16</name>
<fullname>TurboGrafx 16</fullname>
<path>~/RetroPie/roms/tg16</path>
<extension>.pce .zip .cue .PCE .ZIP .CUE</extension>
<command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 SYS pcengine %ROM%</command>
<platform>pcengine</platform>
<theme>tg16</theme>
</system>

Notice that they're almost the same....but the TG16 entry has specified a different /roms/tg16 folder. After adding in that extra system XML code, you'd now restart your system. Then, you could put your TurboGrafx-16 roms into that new folder /roms/tg16 and ES would see them as their own system.

(note: you can keep the es_systems.cfg in its original place or in a secondary location - pros and cons to doing each way)

more detailed method

If all you did was #1 method, next time you do an full RetroPie "update all packages" ... there's a good chance your changes in the es_systems.cfg will be overwritten.

A way to keep that from happening is to make a new "emulators" configuration folder just for the TG16 system in /opt/retropie/configs directory.

You could copy the "pcengine" folder and make the new one be something like "tg16".

If you do #2 method, you'd need to update the es_systems.cfg file for the TurboGrafx-16 to "use" this new emulator configuration.

<system>
<name>tg16</name>
<fullname>TurboGrafx 16</fullname>
<path>~/RetroPie/roms/tg16</path>
<extension>.pce .zip .cue .PCE .ZIP .CUE</extension>
<command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 SYS tg16 %ROM%</command>
<platform>pcengine</platform>
<theme>tg16</theme>
</system>

Notice the <command> line is now different and it tells RetroPie to use the new "tg16" emulator folder instead of the "pcengine" emulator folder.

Method #2 is somewhat more detailed, but doing it this way, your changes in the es_systems.cfg file won't be overwritten. (at least that's been my experience).

There's more detailed ways and changes you can make of course. It just depends on how in-depth you want to tinker with RetroPie. You could split out all of the various MAME categories (Atari Classics, Midway, Classics, Cave, etc) in the same way.