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.

@muldjord
Thank you for your answer. And congratulations on your fantastic work on the Skyscraper, the best multi-platform scraping tool, in my opinion.

Actually, I'm not very comfortable with the process of adding a .m3u file to each of my 2500+ individual Amstrad CPC games (or to every game in my other retro-collections).

And, @mitu, I'm not comfortable neither with the idea of adding a non-standard extension to my games, just to have ES showing the .m3u playlists only. I understand that ".cd1", ".cd2", etc. are like a standard now in PSX multi-disc games, but I suspect a home-made ".dsm", ".disk1" or whatever I could invent in my room for Amstrad CPC/MSX/other Libretro would drive me to a lot of issues when I update/scrape/configure something in the future. The same applies to hidden folders: if I want to update the scraping info, I would have to rename the folder before, re-hide the folder after... Even the idea to manage ".disk1" or ".disk2" sounds laborious when you have hundreds of folders, thousands of files...

But, I still think one scrapped entry in ES for a multi-disc game sounds like the most elegant solution.

So, I share here the solution I took:
1- As mentioned before, I create a .m3u playlist for each multi-disc game and put all the files, including the .m3u, inside a folder with the same basename (I do this with the script in my first post)

2- As @mitu told me, I edit the Skyscraper's config.ini to add the .m3u extension at the platform I want to scrap.

3- I scrap everything. So regular files, regular files in subfolders, and .m3u files get an image+description in gamelist.xml.

4- I duplicate the information related to the .m3u files in the gamelist.xml to create new <folder> sections with the same scraped information. Here is the command lines I used to do this:

# extract the XML sections about .m3u files to a new tmp.xml file perl -ne 'BEGIN{$/="</game>\n";} print m|(<game>.*m3u.*$/)|ms' gamelist.xml >> tmp.xml # change any <game> tag to a <folder> tag sed -i .bak "s/<game>/<folder>/g" tmp.xml # change any </game> tag to a </folder> tag sed -i .bak "s/<\/game>/<\/folder>/g" tmp.xml # crop any .m3u filename to keep the path only sed -i .bak 's/\/[[:alnum:][:blank:]\.\+\&,\(\);_-]*.m3u//g' tmp.xml # delete the closing tag at the end of gamelist.xml sed -i .bak '/^<\/gameList>/d' gamelist.xml # add the content of tmp.xml to the end of gamelist.xml cat tmp.xml >> gamelist.xml # add the closing tag at the end of gamelist.xml echo "</gameList>" >> gamelist.xml

And I must say, I'm quite happy with the result : now I have in ES only one scraped entry for any mono-disc game as I have one scraped entry for any subfolder (multi-disc game). When I select a game that is a multi-disc game, It opens the sublist - that is also scraped with the same information - and I just have to select the first entry to run the game.

I hope all this sounds useful.

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

Thanks Mitu. I ended up using locate to find any corresponding gamelist.xml for the Naomi folder(s) and wiped them, then I just started from scratch, adding one game at a time and it looks like it finally took the information. I must have missed something in there, but just copy/pasting by hand finally nixed the issue.

It was so weird. Before that it was even naming stuff totally wrong. Like I had MegaMan 3 for NES Playchoice listed in the Naomi folder. And a LOT of the games were being listed as Power Instinct, which is not on the Naomi. No idea why it was generating games that weren't in the folder at all.

As @YFZdude mentioned, the genesis folder is a symlink (shortcut) to the megadrive folder, so there's no need to remove it - it's not actually taking any space. You can leave it as is, it's ok - the scriptmodules expect a megadrive ROM folder and updating the MD emulators will re-create the folder.

@SeraphisCain Thanks - there is a gamelist there, but the titles on it are not the ones affected by the issue. There are only a handful of titles and there's no metadata defined. A red herring, I'm afraid.

I appreciate your help, but I'm ready to give up. I don't think it's going to get worked out.

Thanks anyway.

@IanDaemon that's exactly what I plan to use it for. All of the game sequels done with Roman Numerals can be displayed as the publishers intended but also in sequential order.

@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.

I have finally resolved it myself: the Bash Script itself was named "Master Edition" by accident, which led to this particular gamelist entry being ignored, with the bash script name being shown as the title instead, and since it has been ignored - no video.
Can be closed, but I will not delete this for now, in case anyone else encounters this or some of the friendly users who answered want to know where this went.

Just saw this app related to this topic. Its not exactly what I am looking for, just want to link it here: RetroPi Media - gamelist.xml generator

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.

@saccublenda
If i remove the gamelist.xml from the amiga folder the loading screen take couple of min'.
if its still theres takes around 20min' ...

Try moving your amiga roms to another directory to see if the 2 minutes of loading time are due to the large number of roms.

and yeha 9990 and around 5000 reg' in the gamelist.

Ok, that is a number close to my previous estimate. Actually your gamelist contains 10233 entries, and as I expected there are many duplicates, that is the same game is listed as adf, hdf or uae. I suggest you to remove these duplicates both from the rom directory and from the gamelist. This should reduce both the number of roms and the size of your gamelist, and reduce the loading time. I have gamelists with ~ 2500 entries and they take few seconds to load.

Are you sure you don't have an additional gamelist.xml in the ROMs folder (megadrive) ? EmulationStation will look there first and then in the gamelists/megadrive folder.

@mitu Excellent! Thanks for the help! I will try this in the next few days. And thanks for your help in this community!

@muldjord said in Skyscraper: problem with re-naming rom names without bracket info:

Do you perhaps sometimes run Skyscraper from command-line and sometimes from the RetroPie script? And do you then maybe have two different versions?

Maybe I misunderstood and by two versions you meant two different scrapes for a system instead two versions of Skyscraper?
In this case I'm pretty sure I only used Skyscraper from terminal for CPS systems as those were the only ones that originally didn't scrape from RP-script.

@gugue Just like you have .cue files, you can have .cue folders - game1.cue - and they'll show up as games in the list.