Gamelist.xml TOO BIG

shavecat

Hey,
So i add like couple of thousands of games on the Amiga system.
like the Gamelist.xml Size is like 5.5 MG'
And its making my booting (Loading system config...)
REALLY SLOW !
like 20min slow....
wondering if there's away to make the Gamelist.XML SMALLER ????
Beside delete the file ....
Any Ideas ? Apps ? or something like that ? Different files beside XML loading system ?

KN4THX

@shavecat Literally 20 minutes or is that an exaggeration ? The more files you load the more gamelist.xml info ES has to load. If it is around 30 to 90 seconds of load time then that is normal. To speed things up you'll want to delete any unnecessary games. If it is literally 20 minutes then that does not sound normal for that amount of games. That could possibly be a media issue.

simpleethat

So it taking longer to get into emulationstation is perfectly normal when you have thousands of games on your system. That being said, if it is actually taking 20 minutes there's probably a different problem.

I just did some math and it looks like I have about 12mb of gamelist.xml files spread across 20 systems with a total of 7,600+ games. The largest gamelist.xml is 1.33mb for with a total of 1040 games. From the startup raspberries to being to system select in emulationstation my total boot time was just over 1 minute 22 seconds. This build is on a 3B+ with no overclock. I'd clock my portable PiZero build but that only has a few hundred games on it so it wouldn't be much help for benchmarks.

For the more capable troubleshooters out there it would probably help to add some additional information about your setup as outlined here.

Additionally what did you use to generate the gamelist.xml?

How many is "couple thousands"?

What is the actual loading time if 20 minutes is an exaggeration?

I'm willing to dump a bunch of roms and scrape them to see if the problem can be recreated but I'd need some more info to attempt that.

shavecat

Amiga roms like 10000 .
LHA CD32 and more...
and yes its all from the amiga gamelist.xml
its weight 5mg.
if i delete it , the boot take around 2 min'
but with the amiga gamelist.xml
around 20 min' ...
cant delete games from the gamelist , cause the are all there ....
The Gamelist.xml -

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gpXG4k5kQN5J6wLC41EQhzgSBN_Z2tkL/view?usp=sharing

REK607

I had lots of games and trimmed my selection manually. Is it ok to delete the gamelists of every emulator? will it generate new ones after reseting the system? I want to keep it clean for scraping my (big) selection after that.

meleu

@shavecat maybe the tool I wrote two years ago can still be useful for you guys. I posted about it here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11074/a-gamelist-xml-cleaner-tool

Rion

@shavecat Have you tried Parse Gamelists Only?

Emulationstation->Main Menu->Other Settings

Parse Gamelists Only: If on, it will only read the roms you have scraped, so if you add any new roms it will not look for them unless you turn this back off. it is off by default.

shavecat

Thanks everyone for helping..
Yes i did allot of things to try fix it..
at the end i have like Amiga games almost 10000 ,
and if i delete the gamelist of it it works much more faster on the boot .
but im loosing all my list photos and so'.
i will give it a try the ideas this week , and feel up if working :) thanks again

shavecat

@Rion
Got my emulation stuck on the reboot screen...
@meleu
i did try that one too but really seems that too many games list make the loading screen on the reboot longer