Organizing ROMs

[patientFool]

I'm struggling to decide how best to organize so many games. My full ROM set has nearly 3000 titles. When importing them, it's nice that it'll automatically create so many playlists and all. But it's simply too much. Truthfully, I probably only care about 20-30 games. Those nostalgic games I played growing up. So a part of me thinks that I should maybe not import anything but what I actually want to play. Keep it stripped down and as simple as possible. No nested menus, just a wheel of games i like to scroll throw. Trash the rest. 

Then there's the other side of me that thinks, gee it'd be nice to have the option to play the others. And I have them. Maybe there's a way to have my cake and eat it too. But how? 

I'm wondering how others deal with this dilema? What do you import? How do you keep your interface clean and easy to navigate?

[Lordmonkus]

14 minutes ago, patientFool said:

Maybe there's a way to have my cake and eat it too. But how? 

Keep your full set imported and create your own custom favourites playlist, pretty simple.

[patientFool]

But whats a good way to then enter bigbox and be viewing that playlist? Ideally when I load bigbox, I see those favorites and nothing else or something akin to that unless i want to go off and look at the rest of the library which'll be rare. I'd love it if bigbox just showed me my favorites and nothing else unless i want it to. Something like that

[Lordmonkus]

You can set BigBox to load to a specific playlist or platform.

[Johnny T]

6 hours ago, Lordmonkus said:

Keep your full set imported and create your own custom favourites playlist, pretty simple.

@patientFool this is what I do. I have a "Arcade" platform that contains all the games. And then I have a "Classics" playlist based on the All Killer No Filler games (along with some of my own faves).

90% of the time I'm playing games from the Classics playlist but, now and again I like to just dip into the Arcade platform and find other games to play. I've found some brilliant games this way that I would never have experienced. 

It's also good to have it this way in case you have any friends over who might have some nostalgic games of their own that you haven't heard of before

[patientFool]

Thank-you all. Very helpful. I'll tinker with trying to set it up this way @Johnny T. I think this is exactly what I'm looking to do too.

[InvaderJim]

On 5/25/2022 at 12:35 AM, Lordmonkus said:

You can set BigBox to load to a specific playlist or platform.

You can configure BigBox to start up in Playlists view ("Views->Default Startup View"), but AFAIK it's not possible to have BigBox automatically load a specific playlist when it launches.  If you google "bigbox load playlist" (sans quotes) there are several threads asking for this feature.  I'd like to be able to load a playlist automatically at launch, but I haven't found a way to do this.