When you have a large number of ROMs under a single system, the list can be unwieldy. Is there any plans to implement a way to organize the games in a system better? “Folders” or “Categories” so one could select SNES > Platforming > Super Mario World.
We had originally created the “cursors” system for that, but it never really took off (or worked correctly, IIRC).
Currently, the best course of action is to just not keep your full sets in the playlist and instead just have the games you actually want to play.
Personally, I organize my ROMs to have a subdirectory with just my favorites for each system, which I scan into playlists (sometimes; I usually don’t use playlists at all). That keeps my playlists to a manageable 20-30 items per.
The point of the box that I am setting up is that its a one time, setup and forget. It has everything that all friends and family will enjoy. A “best of” for various platforms. Some of these platforms have quite a few great games (SNES and PS1 are two great examples), and so that I don’t have to constantly swap out games (and so little kids don’t have to manually try and find their game on the file system), it would be much easier to organize them into folders or categories of some type.
Well, you can certainly make as many different playlists as you like, even including redundant games. There’s a thread elsewhere on the forum where a guy made a bunch of playlists for different genres, etc., along with instructions for setting up custom icons for those playlists.
I will have to find that thread, thats exactly what I want.
This is the thread I was thinking of:
but it has a whole bunch of unrelated information in there. What it comes down to is: go into the RetroArch assets directory, find the theme you’re using and you should see a bunch of icons with names like “Sega Genesis” etc. that correspond to the various systems you can scan for. If you drop in your own icons with the same name as the playlists you’ve created, they should show up in the horizontal scroll list.
Yeah, @latreides I could get you started on your way to genre-based Arcade playlists for MAME and FBA if you are interested in those games (probably don’t bother with that old thread through, it’s a mess. One day I should make a new one).
To my knowledge there is no equivalent to the MAME catver.ini for console systems like SNES, which is what allows this. Actually there is no reason I can think why someone couldn’t create catvers for console systems and then filter them through genre-filtering tools created for Arcade collections.
But I digress – creating category files from scratch would be a major undertaking. Not helpful for this immediate situation.
One thing that’s also not exactly what you are really asking is that you can use a No-Intro “1 Game, 1 ROM” or 1G1R DAT file and the ClrMamePro software to filter console collections so that only one region’s version of a game is included in your playlists instead of one ROM for every region where the game was localized.
I appreciate the responses and links, but I am only interested in console and handheld games, not arcade games.
It would be great if Lakka had a better way to organize games. It seems like there are partial solutions or implementations, is there a reason that these are not finished/functional? Am I the only one thats really interested in this?
The RetroArch GUI is developing in leaps and bounds – the amount of sophistication in the last three years is amazing for what is essentially a volunteer project.
What you’re describing isn’t really part of any emulator frontend other than for arcade emulation to my knowledge, but given another year or two this might very well be the first frontend to reach the point of sophistication you’re talking about.
I am not asking for any sort of sophistication, simply the ability to categorize my ROM collection. Right now its auto categorized into platform, but I need at least one more level of customization.
Another year or two is an absurd amount of time for basic customization. Maybe you are coming from a user perspective where everything is black magic, but as a software developer for nearly two decades I can assure you that its trivial. It should take a developer that is familiar with Lakka a single days effort, if that. If I could get Lakka working with the emulators I care about, then I might implement this myself (though it would take a bit longer because I am not familiar with Lakka), I was just hoping that such a thing already existed or was on the road map.
In fact, it (Lakka) already allows for this in an off sort of way. I have: Load Content > Start > SNES > RPGS > Final Fantasy VI all I am asking for is to allow a child categories in the existing categories, rather than relying on the file system so that its more direct SNES > RPGS > Final Fantasy VI. There are plenty of other emulators/emulator UI’s that do this, the most recent one that I have used being the NES/SNES mini with hatchi, I have them separated into System > Category > Game.
I think you will like the proposal I submitted over the weekend for an updated playlist file format that, among other things, would lay the groundwork for sorting by genre, number of players, publisher, etc.
Hop over to the Development forum. Right now to be honest what it needs is a developer willing to put together a minimum viable implementation to get the ball rolling. Maybe that could be you? Proposal for playlist file format v2
edit: My professional skills are in project management, community management, and documentation/technical writing. My time estimate comes from my experience in those domains 
Game development, low level API/frameworks, and UI tend to be my area of expertise, so I am estimating based on how long I figure it would take me if I was already familiar with and working on Lakka. My simple need (arbitrary user categories) would be much easier than the more complex fully fleshed out solution you are outlining, but even that it should not be that difficult.
I am still trying to get Lakka working for the emulators it supports that I care about, and trying to find a solution for the couple it doesn’t (like PCSX2). If I am able to solve these issues, I will definitly look in to contributing to Lakka.
Our menu system is hard to work with, and things like child menus are especially weird. It might take a couple of days if someone actually focused on it, but we’re all hobbyists here, so it means someone has to really want to do it and so far no one has.
I think I came up with a (somewhat) kludgy workaround…
I set my “Start directory” to my ROMs folder. I break the systems down by name, folder-wise. I break the ROMS down alphabetically., folder-wise. I change the settings for RetroArch to automatically add new scanned content to the appropriate playlists.
I kinda look at it like this: Lakka works best for what you actively want to play & relies on you maintaining the filesystem organization/library management.
You still know where all your ROMs are, and you’re fine with having to configure each game the first time you run it but it makes it more manageable IMO.