@Folly said in Moving art/video-snaps/gamelists/and-other-settings to USB Drive ALONG with ROMs?:

you also have to copy the media and change the locations in the gamelist.xml otherwise your media isn't found.
You can simply do that with find and replace in a text editor.

Thank you for that information, but TBH the entire point of me making this post is basically to NOT have to manually edit .XML files (and like 30+ of them for all the systems I run). Just trying to see how in RetroPie you can turn on the feature to have the gamelist.xml's and the media folder w/ artwork switched over to the individual rom folders. Skyscraper seems to do this, but that process can take days or WEEKS even (when it's acting up and timing out 99.99% of the time) – so it is possible, just don't know how...

@cdaters said in Moving art/video-snaps/gamelists/and-other-settings to USB Drive ALONG with ROMs?:

What you are proposing is very cool, you are looking for a portable RetroPie set-up much in the same vein as a Portable Apps USB flashdrive. I don't know if this is realistic in the sense that your emulators on each Pi that you run that USB drive on would have to be configured the same way. This includes your controller configs, etc.

Right now I'll be happy if I can get my first step figured out: how to get my games + scraped art onto the USB drive, and have a fresh system read from the USB for those two things (nobody yet has been able to tell me a good way to point RetroPie to the USB drive for those things...).

My premise to do this is simple: scraping is STILL a nightmare, ~SIX years later (since my 1st build). Granted these last two spats have been the best ever, but with a six year history of it timing out forever (even with extra threads on Screenscraper.fr), and taking me literally, no joke, days to even WEEKS to scrape my 30+ systems properly, I have very high doubts it'll continue to be good.

So, when I can get an entire Pi setup, ALL my customizations, all roms working, everything – in a couple hours, minus artwork... but then it can STILL take anywhere from like 6-12ish hours (best case scenario), to DAYS to WEEKS to scrape the art for 30+ systems. This is why I want a USB drive with all games, then in each individual rom directory have the gamelist.xml + 'media' folder with all the art/videos so I never, ever, have to deal with a scraping nightmare ever again.

...I'll deal with the settings later (which BTW, the gamelists have NOTHING to do with any of my other tweaks - they literally just say the game name + where to find the art/videos-snaps... so they work on ANY emulator on ANY model of Pi!).