gamelist.xml overwritten for some systems

[pgcudahy]

Pi Model or other hardware: Jetson nano
RetroPie Version Used (eg 3.6, 3.8.1, 4.1 - do not write latest): 4.8
Built From: retropie-setup from github

Hello, I'd gone through some of my roms and added kidgame tags using the emulationstation UI and then changed the UI to kids mode. However, suddenly after a reboot most of the tags got erased. The only games that retained the tag were in the snes folder. That might be significant since it was an emulator that was not added automatically with retropie-setup and I had to add manually later, which makes me think some sort of autodiscovery process overwrote the other gamelist.xml files. This is supported by the modification times of the files which are all similar

$ ls -lh RetroPie/roms/*/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 382K Nov  8 18:00 RetroPie/roms/arcade/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy  73K Oct 19  2021 RetroPie/roms/atari2600/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy  91K Oct 16  2021 RetroPie/roms/gba/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 345K Nov  6 08:33 RetroPie/roms/genesis/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 142K Nov  6 08:33 RetroPie/roms/mastersystem/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 345K Nov  6 08:33 RetroPie/roms/megadrive/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy  35K Nov  8 18:00 RetroPie/roms/n64/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 196K Nov  8 18:00 RetroPie/roms/nes/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 226K Feb 19  2022 RetroPie/roms/psx/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-rw- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 225K Nov 10 18:23 RetroPie/roms/snes/gamelist.xml

I didn't add any kidgame tags to atari2600 or gba, so those gamelist.xml creation dates are unchanged. But nes and n64 were overwritten at the same time, after I'd added a few kidgame tags. Same for mastersystem, genesis and megadrive.
For unclear reasons, neogeo and retropie are in a different directory, but same modification time

pgcudahy@jetson-nano:~$ ls -lh .emulationstation/gamelists/*/gamelist.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 240K Nov  8 18:00 .emulationstation/gamelists/neogeo/gamelist.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 pgcudahy pgcudahy 2.7K Nov  8 18:00 .emulationstation/gamelists/retropie/gamelist.xml

Any ideas?

[mitu]

There's no 'autodiscovery' process running before or outside EmulationStation. The gamelists are written by EmulationStation when stopping/restarting (by default, but you can choose in the option to write it immediately). The location of the gamelists for most of your system (in the games' folder) indicates you either ran a scraper outside of EmulationStation or you copied the games folders from another system (including the system's gamelist.xml). That shouldn't be a problem though.

Did you restart EmulationStation after adding the kidgame tags and before turning on 'kidmode' ? I'm wondering if there isn't any bug that when turning on kid mode doesn't save the metadata on exit (because of the kidmode being selected).
Did you modify the options for metadata saving/reading in EmulationStation ?