@simonster said in Separating ROM categories?:
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 methodLet'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 methodIf 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.