Solved Favourite SNES Games always Disappearing

[Seramis]

@Substring ah OK, I thought I have misused the search function. Well it is not so terrible. I could delete some SNES games not worth playing, but I was intending to give some full fledged out recalboxos to dear friends and family members and maybe they will miss this or that game afterwards and I thought it would be nice if they just had everything and can do their own favorites. Maybe I should clone the SD card and set up a new system to see if I can reproduce the issue?

[Substring]

@Seramis Have you manually edited any file inside recalbox ?

[Seramis]

@Substring Nope. It is also up to date.

[Substring]

@Seramis @Acris just suggested me that your gamelist.xml could be corrupted ... SO :

• save the gamelist.xml file inside your roms/snes folder
• stop ES (either by pressing F4 on a keyboard, or by SSH : /etc/init.d/S31emulationstation stop)
• delete the gamelist.xml
• restart ES

[Seramis]

@Substring I'll give it a try and report back tomorrow. Thanks.

[voljega]

@Seramis are you using the standard theme or a custom one which you installed ?

[Seramis]

@voljega Everything is standard, I didn't change a thing.

[Seramis]

As I am not a hundred percent sure about how to save the gamelist, I made a copy of my sd- card. Reporting back in a few minutes, maybe we can solve this issue for everyone if it may happen again.

[voljega]

@Seramis a copy isn't gonna show anything if the problem comes from a broken system

To save your scrape, just copy the gamelist.xml files and thge downloaded_images folders.

If you want to save roms alobg with ith, juste copy everything in roms.

Also don't forget bios and saves golders if you have some of those

[Seramis]

@voljega That is true indeed, but if I mess up, I can start over.

[Seramis]

Ok first of all I really have to thank you. This totally solved the issue. However, as a non linux person, but capable of helping myself and intrinsically interested in media, I am going to point out in detail what I have done so that other people can follow this step by step:

1. I downloaded putty here: http://www.putty.org/
2. I typed "recalbox" in my browser to get to the overlay. I searched for the ip adress there (because it is easy).
3. I started putty and gave the program the ip adress.
4. Login: "root" Password: "recalboxroot" (you might want to change this yourself aftewards)
5. I typed "cd .."
6. I typed "ls" giving me the following directions: bios extractions lost+found roms screenshots
   cheats kodi music saves system
7. I typed "cd roms"
8. Again "ls" amstradcpc gamegear mastersystem nes scummvm wswan
   atari2600 gb megadrive ngp sega32x wswanc
   atari7800 gba moonlight ngpc segacd zx81
   atarist gbc msx o2em sg1000 zxspectrum
   cavestory gw msx1 pcengine snes
   fba lutro msx2 pcenginecd supergrafx
   fba_libretro lynx n64 prboom vectrex
   fds mame neogeo psx virtualboy
9. "cd snes"
10. "ls" It threw out all my games and at the end of it the bad "gamelist.xml"
11. As I did a cloned copy of my sd-card I felt brave and hit "rm gamelist.xml" which will delete said list.
12. I made sure it is deleted, doing "ls" again. It is gone then.
13. I typed "/etc/init.d/S31emulationstation stop", because Substring said so.
14. I typed "reboot"

Outcome: The gamelix.xlm repaired itself. I did neither copy my roms, nor copy the gamelist.xml. I figured it might repair itself, if it´s gone. It worked out fine. I think you can clone your sd-card first if you are not so brave.

Anyhow: Issue solved, maybe it should be pinned unter "Favourite List Disappearing" instead? Because it will work with all roms.

[paradadf]

@Seramis i suppose you stoped EmulationStation before deleting the gamelist, but thanks for the step by step guide.

[Seramis]

@paradadf I didn't, but it worked anyhow. I messed with the order but the system doesn't seem to care about it.

[Nachtgarm]

The easy way would've been

1. Start your recalbox
2. make sure it's online
3. access the share via your Network Neighboorhood
4. Go into /roms/snes
5. delete the XML file
6. restart the system via ES

[zz4032]

Had the same problem and fixed it by deleting gamelist.xml and creating it again.

But one thing I noticed is a warning that comes when restarting ES:

/etc/init.d/S31emulationstation stop

/etc/init.d/S31emulationstation start

lvl0: System "favorites" is missing name, path, extension, or command!

Maybe that might help finding out why it happened.