@mitu
Thanks for the straight answer. This works !! It looks so much better. I'm not sure why so many people like their themes gamelists all in uppercase letters ?

@mitu ok thank you. Maybe I can add this as a feature request (on GitHub or in the forum?) and try and work with someone more talented than me on the coding of this.

EmulationStation will use the gamelist.xml ROMs folder, if found, otherwise it looks in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists/<system>. The 2 files are not combined, just one of them is used, in that order.

If you enabled the 'Use Local Art' option in EmulationStation's settings, it will try find a video matching the game by looking under roms/<system>/media/<ROM_NAME>-video.mp4, so even if there's no video declared in gamelist.xml, it might still find a video associated with it.

In fact, what would be the best way to ensure that I get both videos and correct information into my setup?

Don't mix the scrapers if you want video - the internal scraper doesn't support videos so it might overwrite the video tags if you re-scrape with it. Use the external scraper and see which videos have issues - some arcade videos are incompatible with RPI's hardware video codecs and might not play correctly.

@mitu Interesting, I thought I had to install it back then (or whenever I installed RP 4.6). But one tends to forget such one-time installs, so … 😉

@dt42o First and foremost, all of my machines run on Linux, so if yours don't, I don't know how helpful my setup may be for you.

In short, my Pi 4 runs on the official RetroPie image, while the other two use the Ubuntu variants Kubuntu and KDE Neon with RetroPie installed like it's described here. I keep their rom directories synced with the tool Unison which is also available for Windows, but may have to be compiled from source. Many Linux variants have its binary in their software repositories, but I don't know if or where you can get a pre-built binary for Windows.

Conceptually, my PC keeps the main RetroPie setup where I do all scraping, testing and rom management. The other two only receive the end results and transfer any changes, saved games, hiscores etc. back to the PC, which in turn propagates them to the other "child".

I didn't automate this process fully, but use the GUI version of Unison manually, so my approach needs a sufficient amount of consequence in transferring any changes in a timely manner. Since Unison ultimately is a command line tool, automation should be relatively easy, but I like to have the full control and the "last say" in any synchronisation. 🧐

This feature is not supported, ES doesn't do any XML pre-processing, it just reads the node value as is.

@thelostsoul said in Gamelist Addon - an assist tool to manually add new game entries:

About the automation, yes I want that implemented in the main app too someday. Just in case you did miss it,

I actually did miss it. Thanks for the directions.

@Yobiwan Deleting the file from roms/scummvm works. Did you enable the 'Parse gamelists only' option in EmulationStation by any chance ?

Hi @laserbones , you can use ARRM to update only the metadata you want. See Wiki : http://jujuvincebros.fr/wiki/arrm/doku.php?id=scrape_text_only_en
Download link : http://jujuvincebros.fr/telechargements2/file/10-arrm-another-recalbox-roms-manager

@mitu Yes this is a quick hack for people running ROMs from NAS. Specifically, for accessing via SMB shares. stat() has no speed problem with local ROM collection at all. If we look at it further, may be there's a better solution.

@mitu Thanks so much! :)

Ah. Thanks. Thought I was going crazy for a sec there. =D

@Rion Thanks. I used your files. Really useful. Especially the multi bat is very useful in my setup.
I was toying around yesterday with clrmame and romcenter to organise a 0.78 file, but I found it quite hard for a noob. Your files do help a lot !

Thanks!!!!!

@bananapi761 the -dev package is always a source install, otherwise the package would not the latest version.

@WeatherPi
Maybe you could host your scripts on GitHub and hopefully the community would contributes and help you add new features.

Might be better to have short games that take a couple hours to finish unlocked for a day but maybe longer RPG style games should be unlocked for several days? I'm not sure if your friend likes to focus on RPG's to finish them or if he plays RPG's at all. Maybe RPG's only unlocked over the weekend and have a small handful of unique shorter games unlock each weekday (like different ones every weekday)?