Issues with Gamelist Sorting

[doyouheararing]

Pi Model or other hardware: pi 4, 8gb
Power Supply used: canakit official
RetroPie Version Used: 4.8.5
Built From: Raspberry Pi Imager
USB Devices connected: Keyboard
Controller used: snes style game controller

I seem to be running into a weird issue on this install where the "sort games by" option in emulationStation isn't sorting the list very well. For instance, I have a bunch of SNES roms. They all play fine and show in the system menu fine, but they are all out of order. I've attempted to use a couple of scrapers. Most recently, I installed skyscraper from the Retropie-setup menu and did a scrape of all the snes games. The output from the scrape seemed like it was doing very well at pulling all the relevant info. I built the game list and attempted to use the "sort by" filename ascending and some of the list is right, but there are also just a bunch of other titles scattered throughout the list randomly. I feel like I'm probably just missing something here but not sure where else to look.

[doyouheararing]

I may have found something interesting. I was looking at the game metadata via the view option in emulation station and there is a "sort name" field. In that it has the game title but also a bunch of random characters at the beginning. Removed those, and it sorts proper. How would one go about overwriting that for a bunch of games at once?

[sleve_mcdichael]

@doyouheararing said in Issues with Gamelist Sorting:

How would one go about overwriting that for a bunch of games at once?

If you can plug in a keyboard and press F4 to access the console, or if you can log in remotely via SSH, you could remove all (!) sortnames in a single command with:

sed '/<sortname>/d' ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/*/gamelist.xml -i.bup 

sed: stream edit, command to manipulate input streams

'/<sortname>/d': the "script" for sed to follow: identify all lines with <sortname> and delete them.

~/.emulationstation/gamelists/*/gamelist.xml: the file(s) to use as inputs for the stream editor. All the gamelists in your gamelists/<console> folders (see note below).

-i.bup: edit files in-place, and save a backup (with -i, edit files in-place rather than print to console. With -i[SUFFIX], make a backup first.)

Note: if this didn't work, your gamelists might be in the rom folders instead of the ES config folder. Try again with:

~/RetroPie/roms/*/gamelist.xml as the file path instead. Note that Linux is case sensitive, make sure to hit that capital R-P in RetroPie.

[Lolonois]

@doyouheararing said in Issues with Gamelist Sorting:

there is a "sort name" field. In that it has the game title but also a bunch of random characters at the beginning

Question is then which scraping site did you use and which scraper (in addition to Skyscraper), that may have put the characters there?

[doyouheararing]

@sleve_mcdichael said in Issues with Gamelist Sorting:

If you can plug in a keyboard and press F4 to access the console, or if you can log in remotely via SSH, you could remove all (!) sortnames in a single command with:

sed '/<sortname>/d' ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/*/gamelist.xml -i.bup

This sounds awesome. Thanks!

@Lolonois said in Issues with Gamelist Sorting:

Question is then which scraping site did you use and which scraper (in addition to Skyscraper), that may have put the characters there?

@Lolonois So I've used "Scraper for EmulationStation by Steven Selph" and Skyscraper. I'm pretty new to the whole process. I used the defaults for Stevens, which used thegamesdb for its source. Then I felt more comfortable when using skyscraper and used ScreenScraper with it. Honestly, from what I could tell, I think this issue were their before using the scrapers.

[doyouheararing]

This post is deleted!

[doyouheararing]

Sweet!!

@sleve_mcdichael Thanks for that info. Worked a beautiful treat!

I also found where I likely messed up. Some of the roms I have were copied over from another system that uses the same file structure. I ended up finding some gamelist files where I didn't expect them to be and those were the files that had the "sortname" section. Just removed those files all together and re-scraped and generated new gamelists for all the systems. Everything is sorting perfect now.

Thanks for the help!