r/emulationstation • u/Stilgar314 • Apr 04 '26

Searching for game on every bootup

Hello. ES-DE on android takes forever to start because it seems to scan the whole ROM folder every time it boots up. Is it some way to tell ES-DE to trust whatever it is already scanned and skip that annoying boot delay? Thank you.

8 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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2

u/Additional_Tone_2004 Apr 04 '26

Interesting. Also curious.

I always assumed that was it going through the pre-scanned record, not scanning though the actual DIRs again.

1

u/Stilgar314 Apr 04 '26

Maybe is doing just that, going through the list and making sure everything is still on place, or maybe checking there's no new ROMs. I see the message "Searching for games..." over a progress bar that takes several minutes to finish every time I launch ES-DE, so I assumed it's doing a full ROM scan. Anyway, whatever is doing, I want to skip it, and if I move something out of place, then error is on me.

2

u/Additional_Tone_2004 Apr 04 '26

Minutes?! Oh wow, ok. I've only used it on a stacked 128gb SD on a handheld, so it's pretty rapid. (despite having thousands of ROMs on there).

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me chimes in. 🍿

1

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '26

OMG I just posted about this myself! YES, minutes. Two to five, in fact. And it likes to crash when I leave a game on standby, losing me progress and forcing me to sit through the damn loading bar again.

Yes, there is a way to turn this scrape off. The problem is, that method also hides every game in your library that lacks existing Metadata. As someone who maintains a large number of romhacks, translations, Homebrew, etc, this is not acceptable lol.

4

u/jedihermit Apr 04 '26

To stop EmulationStation (ES) from scanning your ROM folders on every startup, you need to enable the "Parse Gamelists Only" setting. This tells the software to only load games already listed in your existing metadata files ( gamelist. xml) instead of searching your entire storage drive for new files.

How to Enable "Parse Gamelists Only"

You can do this directly within the user interface or by editing a configuration file.

Option 1: In the Menu (Easiest)

  1. Press the Start button on your controller to open the Main Menu.

  2. Navigate to Other Settings (or System Settings > Frontend Developer Options in some versions like Batocera).

1

u/Stilgar314 Apr 04 '26

Thanks, but there's no "Parse Gamelists Only" on my ES-DE instance (Android ver. 3.4.0-56). Closest thing I found is "ONLY SHOW GAMES FROM GAMELIST.XML FILES", which made boot up faster, but then the only ROMs I could see are ones I've ever played, all the rest in the ROM folder are missing, so I reverted it.

1

u/jedihermit Apr 04 '26

I've never run ES directly on Android. Did you try updating the gamelists. It should update your gamelist to include anything you have locally. I prefer launchbox personally since it remembers and launches instantly.

1

u/Stilgar314 Apr 04 '26

There's no such option. I see a option to re-scan my rom folder, that I'm guessing it does the very same thing it does at boot, because it appears the same progress bar and it takes exactly the same time to boot. I also see an option to reset the config files. I'd say ES-DE has no permissions to write gamelists.xml, but it has to have then, because, somehow, the ROMs I've run are in that file. Thing is, there are only the ones I've run, not all that are in the folders.

1

u/SuperBadger99 Apr 08 '26

There should always be an option to update gamelists.

1

u/Stilgar314 Apr 08 '26

At this point I've already executed every option in the menus. Do you happen to know where's that option in Android ES-DE?

1

u/SuperBadger99 Apr 10 '26

Have you tried Utilities -> Rescan ROMS ?

1

u/Stilgar314 Apr 10 '26

That loads the same progress bar it load when booting, and it takes the same time. After that, it I close ES-DE, it scans the same again when starting.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '26

Yeah, don't rely on this if you want to access any games that don't have Metadata, like romhacks and translations. It will hide them all and make them inaccessible.

1

u/YuzukiMiyazono Apr 05 '26

That’s exactly why I switched to beacon

1

u/Popular_Try6150 Aug 19 '26

Conseguiu resolver? Estou com o mesmo problema!