General - Startup

On the first start, there's no Windows file caching yet. What is taking so long is the "fileexist" test. When you have a fast SSD or USB drive, or once Windows has cached the file system, it's really fast. But, If you have an old mechanical HDD it takes longer. Also, some themes can take longer to load than others.

One thing you can try is going into the Developer Options screen and enable 'Parse Gamelists Only' This should make it only read the gamelist.xml in each ROM folder rather than scanning all ROMs. If at any point you add your own games, you will need to temporarily turn the option off and restart RetroBat, so that it can scan for the new games at startup.