Morning, everyone!

“It looked to Sacharissa that the only tools a dwarf needed were his axe and some means of making fire. That’d eventually get him a forge, and with that he could make simple tools, and with those he could make complex tools, and with complex tools a dwarf could make more or less anything.”
— Terry pratchett, The Truth

So, I was making a little RetroPie project which quickly spiralled into a big project and them became a massive undertaking, and then I found I was completely lost and couldn’t keep track of anything. So I made some tools to help myself and now after smoothing off the rough edges and writing some documentation I’d like to share those tools with the community. Diving right in:

The first three are complex Excel spreadsheets – I’m afraid they do need Excel to run and won’t work in OpenOffice and similar.

Project tracker: Allows you to keep track of large numbers of ROMs in up to 20 different systems, easily and visually like a big interactive To Do list. Gives you a percentage for how complete various aspects of the project are, for those who love to see that number creeping up and the little boxes turn from red to green one by one. I’ve found it a great motivator when I’m flagging a bit because I can look at it and go “Wow, see how much I’ve done already!”

Gamelist generator: Lets you edit gamelist.xml in a much more user friendly way than just diving straight into the text file. You can enter all the metadata into the tables or import from an existing gamelist.xml, and then when you’re done editing it’s a couple of mouse clicks to generate the file for you to drop into the appropriate folder.

es_systems generator: Similar to the above, but it generates es_systems.cfg. There’s a whole load of extra data about the consoles already in there too, which can be very helpful if you’re building custom themes – at least, that’s what I’m using it for. Like the table above, it generates a .xml file, which you just rename to .cfg and drop into the folder.

Lastly, there’s the DOS games menu – although, it will actually work for any system that reads .sh files. This came about because I had several DOS games running in DOSBox which had extra stuff – expansions, setup programs for joysticks, manuals, level editors etcetera – that I wanted to get to without cluttering up EmulationStation. Now, when I select the game in EmulationStation it comes up with a menu (which looks like the one in RetroPie-Setup) that lets me choose between all the different things I can do with that game.

It comes in two parts: the menu itself, which you put somewhere safe (the default is /home/pi/dosmenu/rommenu.sh) and the launch script for the game. This sits in the ROM folder and there’s a copy for every game – inside you fill in the items you want in the menu and what to do when they’re selected.

There’s comprehensive instructions inside the files themselves, but if you’ve any extra questions, problems suggestions and so forth please feel free to reply or PM me! I just hope others get as much use out of it as I have.

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