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LegacyGamelistFileLocation

1. LegacyGamelistFileLocation is an option inside of ROOT/ES-DE/settings/es_settings.xml.
2. As of ES-DE 2.0.0 any gamelist.xml files stored in the game system directories (e.g. under ~/ROMs/) will not get loaded, they are instead required to be placed in the ~/ES-DE/gamelists/ directory tree.
3. By setting this option to true it's however possible to retain the old behavior of first looking for gamelist.xml files in the system directories on startup.
4. Note that even if this setting is enabled ES-DE will still always create new gamelist.xml files under ~/ES-DE/gamelists/ which was the case also for the 1.x.x releases.
5. gameslist.xml is NOT used for media with es-de so setting this could only help metadata display
6. So It's pointless

Why move gameslist.xml?

1. I really do not understand why you would move gameslist.xml and media some where else?
2. RetroPie and Retrobat keeps gameslist.xml in the root of the rom system dir.
3. This keeps my meta data and media tied to each other and portable.
4. Why would I ever want to split these? I really do NOT get this.
5. OK I found a link. This kind of gives a reason why this might have an advantage. Every now and then I have used a custom emulator for a specific rom and that gets set in the gameslist.xml.
6. I guess this emulator could be system specific ie, Android, VS Windows, etc. Honestly I have only ever done this with a Retroarch Core. So even this should works across systems.

<bool name="LegacyGamelistFileLocation" value="false" />
This gets the metadata to show up, but not the media!

~/ES-DE/downloaded_media

So I do scrape and I find the following in ~/ES-DE/downloaded_media
atari2600\3dboxes\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\backcovers\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\covers\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\fanart\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].jpg atari2600\manuals\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].pdf atari2600\marquees\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\miximages\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\physicalmedia\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\screenshots\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\titlescreens\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].png atari2600\videos\00 MyGames\Dodge 'Em (1980) (Atari) [fixed].mp4

1. ES-DE works differently compared to EmulationStation when it comes to handling of game media.
2. media links in the gamelist.xml files are completely ignored.
3. Instead media files are matched against the relative sub-folder path and ROM/game file title.
4. We will need to make extra copies of all media if we want to use ES-DE.
5. RetroPie, Retrobat, and Pegasus all work BETTER the original way!

Conclusion

This thing is so different. It also messes with gameslist.xml. There is NO point in enabling LegacyGamelistFileLocation. Instead now I think we need to write a powershell script. It needs to move the gameslist.xml file from shared source dir to under ES-DE target. Also all media files need to be copied to matching roms subdir and file title to match rom-name location. All our existing media is game title based, NOT file name based. If this worked like launch box I could have just copied videos into videos. But it doesn't see we need to re-create subdirs matching roms locations.