Collections
Group games across systems — favorites, "now playing", custom lists
EmulationStation collections let you create cross-system game lists — every RPG you've ever owned, your "now playing" backlog, "kid-friendly", "speedruns to try". They live alongside the per-system lists in the home view.
All settings live under ES → Game Collection Settings.
Three flavours
Automated
ES has built-ins for Favorites, Last Played, and All Games. Toggle individually under Automated Game Collections.
To add a game to Favorites: highlight it → press Y. Same Y again to remove.
Editable (curated)
Pick a name, then walk your library and tag games one by one.
ES → Game Collection Settings → Create New Custom Collection → name it. Browse to a game → press Y → in the "Add to collection" picker, select the new collection.
Useful for thematic lists: Final Fantasy series, Top 50 of all time, Kids.
Dynamic (filter-based)
Create a collection driven by metadata filters — every game whose Genre is "RPG", every game from 1992-1995, every game with rating ≥ 4 stars. New games matching the filter automatically appear.
ES → Game Collection Settings → Create New Custom Collection from Theme → choose Dynamic → set filters.
The filters come from the metadata you scraped — see Scraping. Without scraped metadata, dynamic collections have nothing to match.
Now Playing — the backlog tool
A built-in dynamic collection labelled Now Playing. Curates the handful of games you're actively in the middle of, separate from the 800-game library.
Enable it: ES → Game Collection Settings → Create New Custom Collection from Theme (with Art Book Next active) → tick Now Playing.
Add a game: highlight → Y → Add to Collection → Now Playing.
Boot directly into it: ES → Game Collection Settings → Start on System → Now Playing, plus enable Start on Gamelist. Now ArchR boots straight into your active backlog instead of the system list.
Hide systems you don't use
Same menu, Systems Displayed: untick systems you don't have ROMs for to declutter the home view. The systems still exist (ROMs aren't deleted) — they just don't show up.
This is also how to hide the empty systems for stuff you've never bought ROMs for.
Where collections live
/storage/.config/emulationstation/collections/
One .cfg per collection. The format is plain text — one <system-tag>:<rom-filename> per line for editable collections, an XML <filter> block for dynamic. You can edit them on a PC if you want, but the in-ES UI is usually friendlier.