Is it possible to flatten the directories in EmulationStation?

[WesleyBidsnipes]

I've been collecting games for a long time, and those are stored on my NAS. The first thing I did was get the network share mounted on the Retropie so that I didn't have to copy games over. Saves space on the SD card. But I have lots of nested directories. For the Nintendo NES, I have two levels... the first are 36 directories each one letter long (A-Z and 0-9), and inside of those a folder for each game (so that I can group associated materials with the game (boxart, instruction manuals, etc.)

It would be nice though to be presented the list of games though, and a single button press launches the game, rather than drilling down through the directories.

I'm willing to construct custom gameslist.xml for this (not afraid of putting work into it). But I don't want to rearrange these either (I like Retropie, but I plan on having these a long while and who knows what software I'll be using 10 years from now).

Is there a way to accomplish this?

[mitu]

If you'd like to maintain the gamelist.xml manually, you can do so. To prevent EmulationStation to modify it by re-reading your game dirs, you'll need to enable the 'Parse Metadata only' option.

As an alternative, you can create a Custom Collection for all NES games and add all NES games to it. Since it would be too cumbersome to edit the collection, you can do this automatically by running a command to get all .zip and .nes files from the NES system and add them to the collection:

find $HOME/RetroPie/roms/nes -type f -name \*.zip -or -name \*.nes > $HOME/.emulationstation/collections/custom-NesGames.cfg

[WesleyBidsnipes]

@mitu I've only been tinkering with it so far, but this doesn't seem to be the case. When I create such a file, I still have to drill down through the subfolders to play the game, despite the xml file pointing directly at the rom. I do believe i had that option checked, but maybe I'm misremembering. I will test this again.

[update] I just checked. I do have that option enabled. I am still have to drill down through subfolders. I also know it's working because other games are now missing though the files are present in the directory (but not in the xml). I'm assuming this is an intentional functionality (gameslist doesn't flatten directories).