@TPR said in How can I create a "list of games" - Just the titles only?:

Clearly, Emulation Station must pull the data from somewhere to display it on my screen so there's got to be a way to instead have it go to a text file, right?

EmulationStation checks if the file exists on disk before adding it to the list, but it still reads from the gamelist.xml.

You can output the game name and the path at the same time and then read the output in a script that would check if the path is still valid before printing the game. Here's a command that outputs a tab separated list of game path values.

xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//game' -v 'name' -o $'\t' -v 'path' -n gamelist.xml

@mitu Thank you! That was exactly what I was looking for!

@IceChes1 said in Help organizing my FinalBurn Neo Roms. I'm a Newb:

No, I do not know enough. I have never used FinalBurnNeo and thought that the skills I learned from MAME would be enough. Won't reply here again.

fyi MAME also has the concept of non-merged sets. see https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Validating,-Rebuilding,-and-Filtering-ROM-Collections#crash-course-in-arcade-rom-terminology

Haven't been on the forum in awhile and happened to be looking around and saw this. Not sure if you're still looking for info on this.. but i'm a big fan of romhacks, I found the biggest obstacle to be creating the gamelist. Getting a nice romhack list setup in ES or Launchbox takes a fair amount of manual effort.

Obviously none of the scrapers will scrape & create gamelists for you because their romhacks and there is no official list, but if you have romhack naming convention figured out how you like and have them all named, you can get a base XML created from Unviversal XML Scraper (https://github.com/Universal-Rom-Tools/Universal-XML-Scraper/releases) and go from there. I name my romhacks like this:
snes-romhacks-naming (1).png

In ES, I created separate "systems" for romhacks and even English translated roms if I felt there were enough to warrant it. to create the separate systems, I copied the system from the theme folder, renamed it and edited the theme.xml to replace the "ControllerOverlay" art & "logo2" art with a different image (both are normally the controller.svg file, I just a png image, which..mine doesn't line up perfect, but it's good enough for me) so when you're scrolling through you can differentiate between them easily.

You also need to edit the es_systems.cfg and copy the system you want, and rename the affected fields for that.
snes-romhacks-es_systems (1).png

So for SNES, I actually have 4 different systems in my Carbon ES theme folder, and in the ROMS folder:
snes
snes-hacks
snes-msu
snes-trans

For filling in the gamelist fields for each hack, I just kept it simple and did a description, I didn't worry about year/developer/etc. And I just used the box of the original game as the image, I didn't try to find screenshots or specific box art for romhacks. snes-romhacks-gamelist (1).png

As far as your question on patching, I can't really answer that, I pre-patch all romhacks, I'm not sure if emulators can do on-the-fly patching or not. Also compress roms as .zip, just normal compression rate, nothing crazy.

I'm sure there are easier/better ways to do some of this stuff, but this is what I came up with at the time. Hope this info is useful to someone.

Ah. Thank you for your responses. I was just trying to arrange all of the Megaman games I added and sort them by release date. Another I was going to do was just grab a list of top 10 games for each system and make a collection and attempt to put them all in order.

I guess it can wait though! It’s more of an OCD type thing for me lol

Thanks again!

@nevisx Think about using favorites on ES. There you can collect your files so maybe a list with NES translations and NES Homebrew will help you. Real folders are not intendent to work .......

There is a bug in ES that makes folder navigation possible.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11308

But it needs modified scripts to define right emulator calls - from the edge view it is possible with lots of manual editing gameslist files.

@pjft Would it be possible to write a batch script or something that could be run once to simply and easily categorize large quantities of roms without duplication?

My idea is something that works like this. It 'feels' like it would be easy for someone who does these sorts of things, but I know nothing so I could be very wrong.

in '/roms/nes' you make the directory 'Top 50' (or subcategorize by genre, etc.)
You move your top 50 roms from '/roms/nes' to /roms/nes/Top 50'
You put the 'categorize_roms.bat' into '/roms/nes/Top 50' and run it

The .bat file would then take all the roms in the folder, move them back up to '/roms/nes' and replace them with symlinks to each rom in the subfolder.

Obviously replace .bat with whatever kind of script you prefer - I'm working with limited knowledge here.

Is this doable?

@TMNTturtlguy I am indeed swapping out all of my FBA roms to the new version. I was under the impression that there could be problems using old roms with newer FBA, and it is best to update to the corresponding romset?

@cafarellidigital @Mishtakzun you can definetly do what you want, install the rom in one location and link to it. See this thread on how to do it with @meleu script. link text

I use Renamer for Windows. It can clean up file names and delete those numbers you mentioned. Very nice program.