[Wintermute0110]

Thanks. all my roms and assets are on a central server thats mapped on both shield tv's so the address are the same

OK... in that case, it is necessary to copy all files/directories (and replicate the directory structure) inside USER_DIR/addons/plugin.program.advanced.emulator.launcher. If you just copied categories.xml and not the ROM databases then categories/launchers are configured but then when you try to browse a launcher AEL will say "Launcher empty. JSON/XML not found" or something like that.

Easiest way of transferring USER_DIR/addons/plugin.program.advanced.emulator.launcher is to pack into a ZIP/TAR/RAR file (recursive) and then extract on the destination machine.

Edit: having a complex file/directory structure and just not a single 'launchers.xml' like old good Advanced Launcher is the price to pay for AEL's speed and stability (little price anyway cos a normal user will never need to access USER_DIR/addons/plugin.program.advanced.emulator.launcher). Once 1.0.0 is released and the database format more or less fixed I will add a page on the wiki so power users can edit or make tools to generate ROM databases AEL can use.

Edit 2: by the way, although AEL is now much more stable than AL in terms of keeping ROM database integrity, there is a small possibility that databases can be destroyed by concurrency. Nobody has ever reported this problem so far, but it is never a bad idea to make a backup of USER_DIR/addons/plugin.program.advanced.emulator.launcher from time to time.