Trouble with playlists

moroboshi · 28 December 2017 15:34

I’ve been using Retroarch for a good while now on Windows 10, with custom playlists for all those CD systems which the ROM scanner doesn’t support (such as Mega CD, Saturn, and PC Engine CD). They’re time consuming to make but if they’re set up just right, they work perfectly.

I’ve just bought a Shield and I’ve been setting Retroarch up on it. The ROMs scanned by the auto scanner all work fine, but my custom playlists aren’t behaving at all. Most of the time the playlists show up as empty on my Shield, except after multiple hours of fiddling I managed to get a single ROM to show up. The trouble is, if I add anything to this playlist at all, it breaks again and either shows nothing at all, or just random parts of the ROM path.

Here’s the bit which works:

/storage/74D88696D8865670/SuperCDRom/Akumajou_Dracula_X_-Chi_no_Rinne(NTSC-J)_[KMCD3005].cue Akumajou Dracula X Rondo of Blood /data/user/0/com.retroarch/cores/mednafen_pce_fast_libretro_android.so Beetle PCE Fast NEC - PC Engine CD - TurboGrafx-CD.lpl

When I add this below, the next ROM doesn’t appear in Retroarch:

/storage/74D88696D8865670/SuperCDRom/Choujikuu_Yousai_Macross_-Eien_no_Love_Song(NTSC-J)_[NSCD2014].cue Choujikyuu Yousai Macross Do You Remember Love /data/user/0/com.retroarch/cores/mednafen_pce_fast_libretro_android.so Beetle PCE Fast NEC - PC Engine CD - TurboGrafx-CD.lpl

I’ve checked and double checked the paths, and they’re fine. I’ve made several working playlists on Windows, but on Android they’re just not playing ball.

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks all.

Octopaps · 29 December 2017 14:12

Hi!

Every ROM in a playlist has to cover 6 lines. You forgot the checksum at line 5. It doesn’t have to be correct, but it has to be there. Try this:

/storage/74D88696D8865670/SuperCDRom/Akumajou_Dracula_X_-Chi_no_Rinne(NTSC-J)_[KMCD3005].cue
Akumajou Dracula X Rondo of Blood
/data/user/0/com.retroarch/cores/mednafen_pce_fast_libretro_android.so
Beetle PCE Fast
0|crc
NEC - PC Engine CD - TurboGrafx-CD.lpl
/storage/74D88696D8865670/SuperCDRom/Choujikuu_Yousai_Macross_-Eien_no_Love_Song(NTSC-J)_[NSCD2014].cue
Choujikyuu Yousai Macross Do You Remember Love
/data/user/0/com.retroarch/cores/mednafen_pce_fast_libretro_android.so
Beetle PCE Fast
0|crc
NEC - PC Engine CD - TurboGrafx-CD.lpl

moroboshi · 29 December 2017 23:11

Thanks for that, it worked!

Now I have another problem. When I scan my MAME roms, Retroarch returns absolutely nothing. When I scan these exact same files on Windows, it fills up a nice big MAME playlist.

Is there any fix for this?

GraphicsApathy · 30 December 2017 22:33

Hi. New forumer here so I can’t quite yet create a new topic. I am using the latest RA on my GPD XD android gamepad\tablet hybrid thingy, which is custom ROM’d to be seen as a Nexus 5 by Windows. Anyways, my issue is that my playlists (generated by auto-scanning a seperate folder for each system) display each entry in random order. I have employed my google-fu in regards to such and nothing relevant to this issue has appeared. Thanks

Tarrasque · 14 March 2018 13:21

Hi everybody. I’m new here and I can not find a button to create a new topic.

I own a NVIDIA Shield TV, and I have all my MAME Roms on an attached NAS drive.

I can perfectly select and play them if I browse them.

I tried the scan folder feature, but after a whole lot of hours (the set is quite big, almost all the romset forMAME 0.174) the process seemed to finish but nothing happened.

No new entry in the GUI like I expected. No error message (the process run to it’s end. The process display lines kept being shown. I was lucky enough to see the very last rom to be scanned live on the tv screen).

I tried then to scan just one file. Of course it was almost instantaneous but still nothing happened, but at least this seems to rule out the problem could be related to the too large set or memory costraints.

What else could be the problem? Maybe because the roms are on a NAS?

jriker1 · 14 May 2020 14:53

This ever get resolved? I’m having the same challenge and was thinking of creating my own playlists thru the Windows version and then changing the storage paths manually but not sure if I did there would it work and where would I put it?

hunterk · 14 May 2020 18:38

That should work fine, as long as RetroArch can read from the location. Put the modified playlist into your user-storage/RetroArch/playlists directory.

jriker1 · 16 May 2020 00:09

OK so here’s where I’m at. I created a playlist in Windows with RetroArch. Here’s first the paths:

To point to roms from my other computer when on a Windows client: “\homeserver\f$\retrox\Atari - 2600” Path to Roms on my NVidia Shield: “/storage/HOMESERVER/retrox/ Atari - 2600”

Here’s the first couple roms:

  "version": "1.4",
  "default_core_path": "",
  "default_core_name": "",
  "label_display_mode": 0,
  "right_thumbnail_mode": 0,
  "left_thumbnail_mode": 0,
  "sort_mode": 0,
  "items": [
    {
      "path": "\\\\homeserver\\f$\\retrox\\Atari - 2600\\Zoo Keeper Sounds (USA) (Proto).zip#Zoo Keeper Sounds (USA) (Proto).a26",
      "label": "Zoo Keeper Sounds (USA) (Proto)",
      "core_path": "D:\\temp\\RetroArch\\cores\\stella_libretro.dll",
      "core_name": "Stella",
      "crc32": "00000000|crc",
      "db_name": "Atari - 2600.lpl"
    },
    {
      "path": "\\\\homeserver\\f$\\retrox\\Atari - 2600\\Zoo Fun (USA).zip#Zoo Fun (USA).a26",
      "label": "Zoo Fun (USA)",
      "core_path": "D:\\temp\\RetroArch\\cores\\stella_libretro.dll",
      "core_name": "Stella",
      "crc32": "00000000|crc",
      "db_name": "Atari - 2600.lpl"
    },

Any thoughts on how you would retool these paths? Not sure what a playlist looks like on Android to compare.

Guess I should be concerned with the core_path also.

hunterk · 16 May 2020 00:11

I would go to your android device and make a quick playlist with it, just to see what the paths look like. For reference.

jriker1 · 16 May 2020 00:12

Yeah I’d love to but to date my auto searching the roms returns no results so it doesn’t create anything. Otherwise I really wouldn’t be bothering to create one on Windows and transfer it over.

hunterk · 16 May 2020 00:16

I mean: put a ROM on your internal storage and scan it there, just so you can see what the Android path should look like. Then, you can adjust it to point to the NAS’ mount location.

jriker1 · 16 May 2020 00:25

OK I’m wondering also if from what I’m reading if the above is the old playlist format. It was actually created from the GUI but reading seems like it’s an old way of going about it.

hunterk · 16 May 2020 00:29

no, those are the new playlists. The old ones were just plaintext rather than JSON.

jriker1 · 16 May 2020 21:27

So now I’m perplexed. So I got the format “right”, but it’s still not working. Though retroarch will correct it but I can’t see anything different in the file.

So I have the playlist and thumbnails on a network share and pointed RetroArch to it. Deleted any playlists or thumbnails on my NVidia Shield.

So I start up and get:

So I click into that one and try running it. In the bottom left you will see the core loading error:

Look at the information of it and all looks good I think.

So I then go back and select the core manually:

Now the information looks a bit limited:

So it now plays. So I exit RetroArch and go back in and the information is back again and it continues playing:

Here’s the thing though. I went into the playlist and wanted to see what RetroArch tweaked to make the one work as no other ones work unless I re-associated the app to the core, however can’t find a difference between Adventures and Adventures of Tron.

So here’s the Adventures of Tron that I haven’t touched and will error if I try to load it, and the Tron one that works now even after restarting but see no visual difference:

{
  "path": "/storage/HOMESERVER/retrox/Atari - 2600/Adventures of TRON (USA).zip#Adventures of TRON (USA).a26",
  "label": "Adventures of TRON (USA)",
  "core_path": "/data/data/com.retroarch.ra32/cores/stella_libratro_android.so",
  "core_name": "Atari - 2600 (Stella)",
  "crc32": "00000000|crc",
  "db_name": "Atari - 2600.lpl"
},
{
  "path": "/storage/HOMESERVER/retrox/Atari - 2600/Adventure (USA).zip#Adventure (USA).a26",
  "label": "Adventure (USA)",
  "core_path": "/data/data/com.retroarch.ra32/cores/stella_libratro_android.so",
  "core_name": "Atari - 2600 (Stella)",
  "crc32": "00000000|crc",
  "db_name": "Atari - 2600.lpl"
},

Any thoughts?

hunterk · 16 May 2020 21:48

I don’t see any difference, but I am suspicious of the “libratro” in those core paths.

Have you tried going to settings > playlists and try to change the association for the entire playlist at once?

jriker1 · 16 May 2020 22:02

Yeah I think it’s supposed to be libretro and not libratro. I noticed my default core file was libretro but the one I pasted into the individual roms had an “a”. i changed it now wait for the TV to free up to check it again.

JR

jriker1 · 17 May 2020 12:55

Working now so not to bad to do. Some repetitive search and replaces per playlist but one time deals.

hunterk · 17 May 2020 14:20

Sweet, glad you got it going!