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.