It’s no secret that I do lot of playlist stuff in RetroArch. And just encountered a “need” for the functionality to manually sort playlist game entries in the RetroArch GUI (at least on PC). RetroArch itself lacks a way to manually sort the list by hand, but I have a neat little trick to deal with that. It involves renaming game entries.
Create a new playlist or if you have already a list, then go to “Settings” > “Playlists” > “Manage Playlists” > “YOUR PLAYLIST” > “Sorting Method set to Alphabetical”, and set “Label Display Mode” to Remove () and []. As the name suggests, this will hide any parts of the playlist entry between brackets, in example entry “F-Zero (USA)” is then displayed as “F-Zero”. This is just for visual in the GUI and won’t actually change any entry in the playlist file stored on the drive.
And we can abuse this concept to have a custom order for your entries. Just rename the entry in the playlist with the “Rename” function from say “F-Zero (USA)” to “(1) F-Zero (USA)”. If you can’t see any “Rename” option, then go to RetroArch “Settings” > “Playlists” > “Allow to Rename Entries” set to ON. Instead a pure number, this could be the year of the game release or maybe any other information you want this entry be sorted on (like a system name or genre instead). Because this part of the name is hidden, it does not matter for the visual in the GUI, but it matters for the sorting.
Note: Using the Rename entry will always start with a blank entry. Meaning you have to type in the full name of the title, which is annoying. What I do instead is open the playlist file on the drive in an editor and change the label entry directly there. It might be uncomfortable for some of you, but I wanted to include this note for those who have no fear in editing text files:
That’s basically it. You still have to rename the entries, but shouldn’t be a problem with small playlists you care about. Here is an example of before and after of my recent F-Zero custom playlist: (And yes, I include Romhacks as well…)
(BTW, it would be useful to have an “order” tag in the playlist, so we don’t need this hack an can switch back and forth between the automatic order and custom.)
Alternative (and easier) way:
An alternative way to handle customized sorting would be to set the automatic sorting of a playlist to None, then delete the entry (or entire list) and add the game to the bottom. That way every game you add is in order. This is probably much easier to understand and deal with.