ESGME Frequently Asked Questions



General questions

Short answer is No. There are many good built-in options within EmulationStation / RetroPie that can do the initial game art, video and data scraping. Think of ESGME as Microsoft Word for your scraped data. It allows you to hand modify your data and customize it to your liking. It allows you to view the marquee, images and videos for your games as well. You can easily mark games as favorites or not, remove games, add games, etc. Scrapers fall short and often bring in unnecessary or corrupted data you'll have to address anyway. ESGME is your tool of choice for this.

Here's a list of the currently editable fields. If ESGME doesn't understand a field (Tag) it will leave it untouched and unchanged when you save your file. So, don't worry if you have custom tags, they'll be respected. 
<game>
  ...
  <desc>...</desc>
  <developer>...</developer>
  <favorite>...</favorite>
  <genre>...</genre>
  <hidden>...</hidden>
  <image>...</image>
  <kidgame>...</kidgame>
  <lastplayed>...</lastplayed>
  <marquee>...</marquee>
  <name>...</name>
  <path>...</path>
  <playcount>...</playcount>
  <players>...</players>
  <publisher>...</publisher>
  <rating>.</rating>
  <releasedate>...</releasedate>
  <video>...</video>
  ...
</game>

In general, this is the best overall layout for your ROMs on RetroPie. This makes for greater portability should you switch systems and also makes things more organized on a per-system basis. 
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/Images/
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/Marquees/
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/Videos/
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/gamelist.xml
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/rom1.zip
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/rom2.zip
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<SYSTEM>/...