The Batocera store reaches one kind of machine. RetroArch reads the same cartridges on desktop Linux, Windows and macOS, on Android, on the Steam Deck and on the console ports — the same seven titles, a far larger audience — so this writes RetroArch's own library format instead: one .lpl playlist per platform, with box art in the thumbnail folders that playlist's name points at. Three things it does differently, each because RetroArch is not one machine: - It reads retroarch.cfg for its directories. On the macOS install this was developed against, playlist_directory is ~/Documents/RetroArch/ playlists while cores and thumbnails are under ~/Library/Application Support/RetroArch — an engine assuming <base>/playlists writes into the void. The leading ':' of a portable install is expanded too. - It can write for a machine it is not running on (`export`). Android runs RetroArch but cannot run Python, so the only way to serve it is to render the tree here and copy it over; the same mechanism handles an SD card that will be mounted elsewhere. - It refuses to write while RetroArch is running, because RetroArch holds its playlists in memory and writes them back on exit. The Batocera engine defers the write instead; here there is no Ports menu launching us, so refusing is both simpler and safer. Decisions worth recording. One playlist per platform, because default_core_path is a header field — that is what makes every entry start without a core prompt; the entries themselves stay on DETECT so the file survives being moved to a machine whose cores live elsewhere. A missing core is a note, not an error, or the store would never run for anyone the first time. The playlist name carries the store's name, so we never write into RetroArch's own Commodore - 64.lpl and never collide with the official thumbnail packs — and an entry the user added to our playlist survives a rewrite. Thumbnails must be PNG and one of our covers is a GIF, so the engine shells out to sips/magick/convert/ffmpeg, and simply goes without the image if the machine has none of them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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__pycache__/
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*.pyc
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