[Feature] Hide roms with a metadata tag

[AmadhiX]

There are a number of situations in which a user might want to hide a rom from the romlist, most commonly parent/child and bios/game dependencies. Some emulators can work around some of this, but not all situations currently have common-knowledge solutions.

It seems like an elegant solution might be a <hidden /> tag in the gamelist.xml?

Something like:

<game>
    <path>./bios.zip</path>
    <hidden />
</game>

Or:

<game>
    <path>./bios.zip</path>
    <hidden>true</hidden>
</game>

That should cover any scenario in which a rom in the roms path wasn't meant to be shown, without any scenario-specific work.

As far as UI, it could be a checkbox on the metadata edit screen, and there would probably have to be a "show hidden" checkbox somewhere.

[nilsbyte]

Nice idea to add a "HIDE" checkbox in the meta data editor. To get to all hidden games, the search function could have a predefined filter to only show the hidden games. I will evaluate this with @Aloshi.

[AmadhiX]

Sounds great!

Putting this value in the gamelist.xml would also let you manually edit it, and make it compatible with third-party utilities. I'm thinking things like sselph's command-line scraper utility or the clean-up helpers that lakeuk and ininmaster made.

[ReproBros]

Anyone working on this? I would greatly appreciate this feature :)

[MattWatt]

+1 for this idea

My biggest reason would be for hiding bios ZIPs in my roms folder from showing up in my game list. MAME emulators being a big reason for this. Some seem to only want those with the game roms themselves, but wouldn't be launched on their own.

This seems like an elegant and hopefully backward compatible addition to the schema.

[biscuits99]

+1 for this idea

[Thijzer]

It's better to list your system files instead of treating them as equal "games" <system_files> bios.zip|bios2.zip </system_files> PS: the list might be larger for some then you would expect.

[celso]

+1 for this. Having the neogeo.zip show up the game list is unaesthetic.

[sub-atomic]

+1. This is absolutely a must for aesthetics. I hate having my bios files show up in the game list.

[capeman29]

+1 on this one, neo-geo showing up in my roms lists is kind of weird

[nosfay]

You can hide BIOS files on linux version by renaming them to .ZIP (instead .zip) . I guess it doesnt work on windows because caps doesnt matter on it.

[wolf-sigma]

Hi - I wanted this too, so I implemented it. I tested this on MacOS (with an upstream patch) and Windows, and it works well.

https://github.com/t3hi3x/EmulationStation/commit/196d9175c38da86f778e6a1af4fc8abb09270eea

It works in a few ways:

• Under "Edit Metadata" there is an option to hide the file - it will disappear when hit Save
• It then adds a <hidden>true</hidden> tag to the file (you could do this in the gamelist.xml files too)
• You can then show the hidden files by putting a <bool name="ShowHiddenFiles" value="true" /> in es_settings.cfg

[MattWatt]

Nice t3hi3x. I don't know if you're familiar with RetroPie, but they have a fork that they make tweaks to. They might be one of the biggest groups using EmulationStation with a vibrant user base. You could try putting your changes there.

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation

[wolf-sigma]

Hey @MattWatt - I posted it over there (I used EmulationStation on several platforms including RetroPie, so was a good call). I do think they'll push back a bit though because they're trying not to deviate much from upstream, but we'll see.

I'm hoping the upstream version will continue development. It's by far the best project for this type of use case.

[kawauti]

+1 for this idea

[akielbasa]

hey just to throw an idea into the mix for multi cd games you usually defenetly want to hide the cd1, cd2, cdn file due to issues with renaming endings and everything

from an old coding job we made files "private" (old timey code style) with an underscore in front. no setting needed.

i could see this as a valid work around here, no need to hide disk 1 by 1 if there is an underscore in front => wont get shown / scraped anything.

just as an idea that it those files you might never want to scrape anyway

[Kedryn]

2015 a really nice idea

and it's still OPEN?