Hiding Emulators Without Deleting Roms (Help!)

Puchi25

Hi, I'm currently trying to build a cocktail style arcade cabinet using retropie. I've got all of the emulators and games running vertically on a monitor. I've also got the provided emulation station theme, vertical arcade, installed with retropie. The only problem I have with this setup is with the unsupported game art that isn't provided with the console emulators. The vertical arcade theme only supplies art for arcade emulators. I've got game collection art grouping the console games together and now i'm trying to hide the original emulators without deleting any of the games inside of them.

I've done my research and found that you can "comment out" the system name in es_systems.cfg file.
I've had difficulty locating this file and even tried to locate with /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg and also using the "locate" directory

Whenever I try any of these, I always get a "Permission denied" error.
I made sure the Pi user I was using had full admin access and also full sudo (sudoers) access.

Why can't I get into that es_systems.cfg file? Am I missing something? Please help.
Also, is there any other known method of hiding emulations without having to go and comment out their name?

Thanks!

quicksilver

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/EmulationStation

The section you are looking for is es_systems.cfg edits

You should not be editing the es_systems.cfg in the /etc/ directory

Puchi25

Why do I get a "Permission denied" when I use the
/etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg directory

I'm trying to figure out how to get into each emulator's config file.

Really new to all of this, not exactly sure what I'm doing wrong.

mitu

@Puchi25 said in Hiding Emulators Without Deleting Roms (Help!):

Why do I get a "Permission denied" when I use the
/etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg directory

Because you don't have permissions to write to that file, it's owned by the system and not by your user (pi). As @quicksilver suggested, you need to copy the file to your own folder and edit it - take a look at the doc page he posted.

EDIT:

I'm trying to figure out how to get into each emulator's config file.

The emulators' configuration file is not in es_systems.cfg, it's in the emulators.cfg file from each system's config folder - which is explained here.

steptoe

Why not simply uninstall that emulator from the retropie setup/install menu. It won't remove any ROMs or data, simply the emulator which you can reinstall later if you so wish

dudleydes

@Puchi25 said in Hiding Emulators Without Deleting Roms (Help!):

I've got game collection art grouping the console games together and now i'm trying to hide the original emulators without deleting any of the games inside of them.

This won't work with custom collections. To quote @pjft, the developer of custom collections (original post here):

The custom collections rely on games that ES knows about.
ES only knows about games that it loads.
ES only loads games from systems that it knows.
ES only knows about systems defined in es_systems.cfg.

In short, removing a system from es_systems.cfg will remove games for that system from a custom collection.

If you wish to create a collection for console games, then you will need to manually create a new system in ES. Full documentation can be found at: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Add-a-New-System-in-EmulationStation/

This process involves creating a custom es_systems.cfg file so please follow the advice given by @quicksilver. Adding a new system in the default es_systems,cfg in /etc/emulationstation means that should you install an emulator at a later date, the file could be overwritten, removing the new system.