Arcade Playlists Empty

[Drybonz]

I just noticed my Arcade playlists from the MAME importer are all empty.  Is there a way to re-populate these without running the entire importer again?

[Drybonz]

I deleted my arcade platform and re-ran the MAME importer, but my playlists are all still empty when it finished, even though I asked it to populate the playlists during the import wizard.

Any help on this is appreciated.

*edit*  Along the same lines... if I want to delete playlists (like all the empty ones), the only way I can see to do it is do them one at a time, and there are many... so, I tried deleting the playlist folder in the LB directories and LB is re-creating them each time I close it.  How can I permanently delete these and try to start fresh?  

Edited December 16, 2022 by Drybonz

[faeran]

Not sure why that would be happening.

The auto-generated playlists don't get populated with games, but instead a list of rules get set up and any game that matches them will get added to the playlist. For example the Capcom Classics playlist will add games where the Platform is equal to Arcade, and the Publisher contains the word Capcom. You can right click any playlist to see what their auto-populate rules are, and which games found a match.

You must first fully close LaunchBox, including making sure it's finished it's closing process by making sure it's not running in task manager. Then you can delete the playlist files without having them return.

[Drybonz]

Thanks.  I worked through most of it last night.  I realized the playlists were using the name MAME instead of arcade, which is one I had used a long time ago.  Not sure why that was still in there, but obviously that was causing the empty playlists.  I ended up deleting all the extra ones manually and then manually changing the platform names in the autopopulate rules.  It took a while but I'm back on track and organized now.