@mitu This is SO helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time to share this info. I genuinely appreciate it.

@mitu I figured that was the case. Thanks for the response!

@mitu
Yes I read the gpu setting on the pi4 is managed dynamically and is best left alone as it can harm performance increasing it.
I do try to keep everything default and use the advice in the documents.
I have been able to replicate the issue over and over. I decided to try turning off and on many different features under emulationstation settings and keep testing.
It's probally nothing to do with the issue but after turning OMX on and doing the test again so far ive managed to add hundreds of games without issue. I will create more collections and try again this has been the most successful for me so far. I can't really see why this would help as when adding games to the collections i don't give it time to start playing any video.

Update
Tested again with same setting OMX on with existing and new collections and worked fine.

Thanks Sim

@Coldcoat please add some more details about your system as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

What hardware are you on and how did you install RetroPie? Please attach the relevant log from ~RetroPie-Setup/logs from when you tried to install Drastic.

From the distance/information provided some guesses.

As you state it works most of the time and then the custom collection loading fails: Could be that the threaded loading may have an impact.

To switch the threaded loading: Locate your es_settings.cfg (usually /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation. Spot the entry <bool name="ThreadedLoading" value="<your_value>" /> and bool invert that <your_value> (e.g., true gets false and vice versa).
Then run this config for a while / for several reboots and note if your reported effect still occours.

To avoid the daunting task of re-enabling all of your collections in ES make a copy of <string name="CollectionSystemsCustom" value="yadayada,yabadaba,..."> and keep it in a safe and dry place thus you can restore it if you encounter the effect again. But only do edit your es_settings.cfg while ES is not running. And do not put an extra space between the delimiter (,) if you want to edit collectionnames manually in the editor.

Also make sure you only use ASCII characters for your collection custom-*.cfg files. (But I doubt this is the cause, as the custom collections loading would fail everytime).

Last but not least: The pugixml, which is an external lib to ES and is actually handling every xml in ES (f.i., es_settings.cfg) is a little dated (1.8 from 2016), current is 1.11.
Maybe updating remediates your issue. However, I skimmed over their releasenotes/issue tracker but did not find on a cursory look a bug directly linked to long string reading (i.e., your value of name="CollectionSystemsCustom").

HTH

@lolonois and yet, it tracks their last-played date and even groups them into a last-played category if you enable it. As long as you have network access, you have an accurate clock I think.

@mitu I may try out the dev version for the scrolling game titles fix, but removing the system name wouldn't quite fix the issue here, since then it would then just be a different set of games (same title on different systems) that would be indifferentiable. Ideal (for me) would be both full game title and the system name, but I understand it may not be a priority for anyone else.

@mitu said in Add folder contents to custom collection?:

Custom collections support only individual files. You can however list the folder and add the full path of each file to the collection's .cfg file - the file is just a list of paths.

Thanks @mitu for confirming. I'll dump pipe the folder contents to a txt file and copy/paste. I was just hoping that there was a more dynamic way of doing it so Ian drop new roms in and have the collection pick them up automatically.

Marked as solved.

John

@sleve_mcdichael said in Hide Systems - Only Keep Custom Collections?:

If you use one "all games" system you won't need the "all games" collection but if you did use it, they would all just say [ALL]

That's true, but this can be disabled under 'Game Collection Settings'. There is an option in there to turn off 'Show System Name in Collections'.

Thanks for your help.

@chizzer
We've all been there. In fact I just recently was scripting some batch file operations and introduced a space after something that broke it all. Gotta love those facepalm moments.

Glad you got it sorted now.

Captura de pantalla_2023-09-04_16-12-48.png

@mitu
Thank you! that was the problem The SD card was full like 100% full!. I free-ed up some space and my favourites etc, are being saved. I tested restarting emulation station and re-booting the Pie. All working fine now.

I feel like a fool! Thank you for your help.

Not a complaint, but a request: it might be nice to get a big fat warning if settings cannot be saved due to no SD card space. But from now on I will make sure to leave some space on the SD card.

@mitu Thanks, I'll try that. As for the script. It needs to be run to start the lightgun service to get the lightgun working. Only needs to be run once though. I think this is just a work around at the moment. Hopefully, once the sinden lightgun gets established, it will be integrated better with retropie.

@mitu thanksss

I just discover how to do it now, my bad.
https://github.com/JungleJim42/es-theme-collections
this provides some help.
Basically i was putting the folder in themes with the same name as the .cfg (ex: custom-test).

To make this work the Collection .cfg in .emulationstation\collections should be custom-NAME

and

The Theme .emulationstation\themes (create the folder if u didnt have one) copy existing theme that u want to customize from Theme folder in /etc/emulationstation/themes to the new folder that u just created, then the new folder should have the name of the collection "NAME" and not the full .cfg name "custom-NAME".

U can copy the .xml from other collection then just tweak it, it is actually super ez.

Edit: for Automatic collections just do the same process but the names for the folders are "auto-lastplayed", "auto-favorites" and "auto-allgames".

To play the shitty games that suck ass.....

@Yobiwan for Windows I personally like notepad++ for editing text files.

You can add an XML tool that helps if you're editing your gamelist.xml files and accidentally mess up the syntax.