Simplest way to combine Mame & FBA folders into Arcade folder?

benjaminjay

I've seen a few different posts on this such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/760v0l/combining_arcade_roms_into_a_single_folder/
Is there a consensus on the simplest/quickest way to actually utilize the arcade folder if you already have all of your arcade roms properly configured in mame-libretro and fba? Is it possible to use a custom collection within your theme to achieve this rather than moving everything?

lostless

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lostless

You could use a custom collection. I use the arcade folder. It looks cleaner. Most of my roms are MAME 2003 roms, so i use that as the default. But if i need to use FBA for cps3 or others, I have that Romset too and manually select FBA for those roms.

mitu

There have been a few posts here also. There is only one way IMHO - copy your ROMs to the arcade folder and use the Runcommand to select the emulator to run the ROM. Add a default emulator (lr-mame2003) to run the ones from mame-libretro, then add exceptions for the ROMs from the fba folder.

You can automate this if you have the list of ROMs per emulator - Runcommand saves this association in the emulators.cfg file from /opt/retropie/configs/arcade. So you can copy 1 ROM from fba and use Runcommand to choose lr-fbalpha to run it. Look how it's saved in the .cfg file, then create the rest of the lines for the ROMs in the fba folder. Make sure you don't have overlapping zip files (i.e. same ROM).

benjaminjay

@mitu when I'm moving the files from mame-libretro folder to arcade folder, am I also moving the sub folders (downloaded_images, mame2003)?

benjaminjay

I have managed to move all of the roms and scraped images from mame-libretro and fba into the arcade folder. I modified the emulators.cfg file in both the /opt/retropie/configs/arcade and /opt/retropie/configs/all/ folders so the roms all launch with the correct emulator. I re-scraped and all of the images now show up for each rom. I added a new launching.jpg to /opt/configs/arcade/ so it just displays a generic arcade rather than a specific emulator. Two things have now happened:

Collections containing games from the mame-libretro and fba folders no longer display those games (CPS 1, 2 & 3, etc)
There does not appear to be a gamelist.xml file in the arcade folder

benjaminjay

Fixed collections by manually editing the config files in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/collections

mitu

@benjaminjay said in Simplest way to combine Mame & FBA folders into Arcade folder?:

There does not appear to be a gamelist.xml file in the arcade folder

That file is created by the scraper, the internal Emulationstation scraper does not save the gamelist.xml in the ROMs folder, but in ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/<system_name>`.

benjaminjay

For some reason my Neo Geo games are showing up in my merged arcade list even though the roms are in the Neo Geo folder... I deleted the gamelist.xml in ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/arcade and scraped but it didn't write a new file in that directory...

mitu

@benjaminjay Are you using a 3rd party image or did you built your system starting from the image from retropie.org.uk/download ?

benjaminjay

@mitu not 3rd party but it's been a while since I messed around with this so I'm fuzzy on some of the details

mitu

@benjaminjay If there is no gamelist.xml in the ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/arcade folder, check if you haven't got the gamelist.xml in the ROMs folder. Also, check if you have enabled "Parse Gamelists Only" in Emulationstation.

benjaminjay

@mitu There is no gamelist file in either of those directories. "Parse Gamelists Only" was not enabled.

benjaminjay

@mitu turns out some of the neo geo roms were duplicated in the arcade folder... simplest explanation right? lol