How to: Manage your Games

Supported file extensions for each emulator

For a detalied list of which file extensions are supported and where to put the roms check this page (STILL WIP): ES-DE: Folders and Files

Multidisk/file games: Directory interpreted as files

You can put all the game files inside a sub-folder in order to keep you game list clean, these folder will be seen as the game itself from RetroDECK and not as an actual folder.

The folder needs to have the corresponding .m3u file and the folder needs to be renamed to the exact filename of the .m3u.

More info in the ES-DE UserGuide.

Example:

In this case the folder will be viewed as a single game and it will launch Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u so you can easly swap the disks from RetroArch menu.

─── Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u   <--- Folder
    ├── Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk1.chd <--- Game Disc
    ├── Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk2.chd <--- Game Disc
    ├── Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk3.chd <--- Game Disc
    └── Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u <--- The .m3u file

How do I create a Multidisk Directory?

Let's use the Dragon Fantasy VII example as written above. It is a fake PlayStation 1 game.

Step 1: Make a .m3u sub-folder

Make a new sub-folder inside the roms/psx directory (or what ever system you are creating for) where you move and store the Dragon Fantasy VII files with a .m3u file extension in the end. The name of the folder will be Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u and the full file path will be:

~/retrodeck/roms/psx/Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u

And it should have the disc files inside of it:

─── Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u   <--- Folder
    ├── Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk1.chd <--- Game Disc
    ├── Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk2.chd <--- Game Disc
    └── Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk3.chd <--- Game Disc

Step 2: Make a .m3u file inside the folder.m3u

Following the example above, make an empty file inside the Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u Folder called the exact same thing as the folder name in this case: Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u. Now the full file path to the newly created .m3u file should be like this:

~/retrodeck/roms/psx/Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u/Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u

Step 3: Populate the .m3u file

Open the Dragon Fantasy VII.m3u file with an text editor and write the filenames of all files contained in the folder, one per line. When you are done, the structure of the file should look something like this:

Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk1.chd
Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk2.chd
Dragon Fantasy VII - Disk3.chd

Note this also works with other files types like .bin .iso .cue .bin etc.. You just need to make sure that all the files in the folders are written inside the .m3u file.

Step 4: Launch RetroDECK

The ES-DE interface that RetroDECK uses should now pick up on the game as one file and you can change disks inside RetroArch.

Emulators compatibility lists

Here is a collection of compatibility lists

Scraping

ES-DE supports the two scraper services ScreenScraper.fr and TheGamesDB.net.

Scraping allows you to make the games look "pretty" with coverarts, icons, discimages and more. Read up on the ES-DE userguide on scraping here:

ES-DE Scraper guide

Quick tips

On most occasions you want to use ScreenScraper and not TheGamesDB. But for PC titles scraping from TheGamesDB might be better.
You will need to register an account on ScreenScraper.fr to scrape (support them on Patreon for faster downloads, more scrapes per day and priority scraping).
Login to your Screenscraper.fr account inside of the ES-DE interface in RetroDECK
Choose what content you want to scrape (remember that each content you choose could take up several mb of data per game).
Do an initial scrape of all the games you want to scrape.
If some games are missed do a more narrow scraping by enabling Scraper -> Other Settings -> Interactive Mode -> On& Scraper -> Other Settings -> Auto-Accept Single Game Matches -> On and choose to scrape by games missing metadata. This will allow you to select each game from a list and also tweak the searches of the missing games.
In some cases you need to remove certain aspects of the name like if a rom comes both with a Japanese name and English name, you could try to remove one of the names to find a better result.

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