Several options are available in this menu:

• AUTOMATIC GAME COLLECTIONS: Batocera can create automatically some collections, based on the information scraped in your gamelist.xml files. You can create automatically collections for 2 and 4 players games, all games (on all systems), favorites (across all systems) and the never played or last played games. For arcade systems, you can also have automatically created collections by editor or arcade system, like sega, snk, namco and so on.

• CUSTOM GAME COLLECTIONS: to manage the personal collections you have created.

• CREATE NEW CUSTOM COLLECTION: in order to create your personal collections. Once you have given a name to your new collection, you can add games from the menu by pressing the Y button on your controller. When you are done with adding games in your collection, a new item FINISH EDITING COLLECTION will appear in this menu to let you close it.

• GROUP UNTHEMED CUSTOM COLLECTIONS: toggle on if you want your collections to all appeared in a dedicated COLLECTIONS item at the top level on the menu, otherwise each of your custom collection will appear at the top level.

• SORT CUSTOM COLLECTIONS AND SYSTEMS: in case you have set to “off” the previous option, do you want your collections to appear amongst the other systems, ordered from their alphabetical names among the other systems (toggled on), or would you prefer to see all your collections grouped together at the end of your systems list (off)?

• SHOW SYSTEM NAME IN COLLECTIONS: toggle on if you want to see the [SYSTEM] added after the game names in your custom collections. Otherwise only the game name will appear. Useful if you have the same game name across multiple gaming consoles.

Personal custom collections are stored in /userdata/system/configs/emulationstation/collections/. They are simple text files that you can edit manually, or edit through the UI described above.

As an example, a custom-mario.cfg file that would look like:

/userdata/roms/gameandwatch/Mario Bros. (Nintendo, Multi Screen).mgw
/userdata/roms/nes/Mario Bros (NES).zip
/userdata/roms/gb/Super Mario Land (World) (Rev A).zip

If you are using Batocera 5.26 or later, you can use the command batocera-create-collection to help you create custom collections.

For example, if you want to create a collection for your “Mario” games like on the example above, you can use it with batocera-create-collection mario and it will create a custom-mario.cfg custom collection file, with all the games that have “Mario” in their names or descriptions.

You can tune your custom selection with command line switches to select only a specific system, or a specific genres of games, and invoking the command subsequently. For instance, if you want all “ball” games on NES and Gameboy in a “ballers” custom collection, you can start with batocera-create-collection -c ballers -s nes ball and then add GB games to the same custom collection by typing batocera-create-collection -c ballers -s gb ball. Note that you need to have your games correctly scraped in order to have this command search in the game names (especially for Arcade games on MAME of Final Burn Neo) or in the genres of the games.

Batocera 5.26 and later also let you create Dynamic Collections from EmulationStation.

Think of dynamic collections like rules you set up in your e-mail client to automatically create “smart folders”: when you receive new e-mails that match the predefined rules, they are showing up in the right smart folder automatically. Dynamic collections on Batocera are the same: you start by creating rules to set up your dynamic collections (match a string in the game name, a gaming system, a genre…) and when you add new ROMs matching those rules, they show up automatically in your dynamic collection. This way, you can share dynamic collections with your friends, even if they don't have the same ROMs, or if their ROM file names aren't exactly the same as yours.

- Add details on the format for dynamic collections.