Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper

[muldjord]

@LocVez Yes, gamesdatabase will ban you if you overuse it.

I had a quick look at emumovies, I'll ask them for developer access to the api and let you know if I get it. Then I will include it if the API they provide fits with Skyscraper. It probably does, but I don't know atm. :)

[Rion]

@muldjord They probably will. Just as long as you can input your username and password.

Been a lifetime member there for ages.

[Rion]

Opps dobbel post..

[LocVez]

@muldjord Many thanks!

[AnalogHero]

@LocVez They banned me in the past, but after 2 weeks it worked again. Im glad it wasnt forever.

[muldjord]

Wooooooo!!! Video tutorial!!!

Please spread the word! :)

Please, please, PLEASE check this out if you are new to Skyscraper. I have a feeling most people only use Skyscraper to just scrape once using the default scraper and then leave it like that. It really is too bad, since the most important feature in Skyscraper is the local db cache. This video explains why it's important.

[AnalogHero]

@muldjord Thanks for the video. As i see now, i did it right. What bugs me a little is what happend in your video.
After the default scrape, you scraped with thegamesdb.
Then you scraped with uvlist and afterwards with localdb.
Result: 1 game skipped.
Then you scraped with screenscraper and afterwards localdb.
Result: 2 games skipped.

Hope you understand what i try to say. :)
This happened on my retropie aswell.

[muldjord]

@analoghero Ah, I know why! It's because the search match becomes too low for one of the games because of how the title is prioritized from the different scraping modules. So one title makes the search match go below 50% which it didn't when scraping with the source originally. So basically it is /meant/ to do this, but I should still look into it. I'll figure something out for 1.8.3.

Bottom line, it's not an error, just lower the minMatch to '0' with '-m 0' when scraping with localdb and you'll get the nice result again. :) But I do want this to make sense to the user, so I'll do something about it anyways.

I do have another very minor bug I found while investigating this though, so I'm glad you brought it up. Either way, 1.8.2 is working just fine, so no need to hold your breath for 1.8.3. :)

EDIT: I've had some more time to think about this "problem". And I've decided to leave it, simply because it isn't an error at all. I can see how it seems confusing that addmore resources from more scrapers suddenly makes it skip more games than previously. But the explanation is simply that the title of a game from a certain module is prioritized above the other titles, and that title makes is go below the minimum match percentage threshold. This is easily "fixed" by lowering the threshold. And it is /supposed/ to work like this. The priorities can easily be changed inside the 'priorities.xml' file as described in the documentation on github. So in the case of the Youtube howto I made, lowering the 'title' priority for 'screenscraper' to go below that of 'mobygames' will /also/ make the "problem" go away. I am absolutely in agreement that this seems puzzling if you don't understand or make use of the priorities. It seems like it "going backwards" when you scrape with more scrapers, when in fact it just got a title from a new scraper that was of higher priority and then gave a worse percentual match to the filename. That's all it is. And it's not an error. :)

[Used2BeRX]

Every one of my gamelists are in home/pi/RetroPie/Gamelists.

That way when I re-run the script meleu has been working on and they get updated there, the symbolic links from the location that Emulation Station looks for them link to all of the files in a single folder and they automatically work on a reboot instead of having to manually move 12 to 15 files to as many locations when an update is made.

Might want to look into doing something like that yourself. Saves a ton of time, especially when you're probably updating things all the time with the testing you're doing.

[muldjord]

EmuMovies has accepted my request for developer access. I'll get the details soon and start looking into an implementation. I'll keep you posted. :)

[HurricaneFan]

@muldjord Is there a way to have boxart without a drop shadow and not centered. Like just a raw boxart image?

[muldjord]

@hurricanefan Yes, please read the readme on github.

[StephanePare]

I've noticed that out of 700 NES titles, there's 32 that your scraper can't recognize purely because the article (the, a) is already at the end in the original file name (As per GOOD tools standard), messing with the name recognition. for example:

Punisher, the

Simple name, but big problems finding it even though the default emulationstation scraper finds it no problem. for now I'll simply rename the offending roms and re-run the scraper when I have time, but I thought this might be worth mentionning. Originally there was 50 titles, but after running from multiple source it dropped down to 32.

[muldjord]

@StephanePare Yeah, it's a well-known problem. The thing is this: If I do it one way, it won't work with X scraping module (Because it has the name as 'Punisher, The') and if I do it the other way it won't work with Y scraping module (Because it has it as 'The Punisher').

If any of you guys have ideas for how to better handle "The" let me know. I was thinking that perhaps I could just leave out "The" altogether if it exists at the beginning or the end of a name (and of course add it back in later). Not sure if that would cause other problems though. I've kindof reached a place where the puzzle is so complete, that changing things one place, will screw with things in other places, so it's a bit of a fidgety thing to get improvements in there now, that won't make other matches get worse... Makes sense?

[Rion]

@stephanepare May i ask why you are using Good tools collections? Go with No-Intro sets instead.

[StephanePare]

@rion it's the first time I ever hear of any other set than GOODtools, I've always assumed them to be the only standard and that it didn't change. I'll google my way into that "no intro" thing

@muldjord I've always thought that was how some scraper worked, but I'm obviously no coder.

[HurricaneFan]

@stephanepare My understanding is there are no-intro sets for the following systems. Not all of these work in RetroPie though:

Atari - 5200
Atari - 7800
Atari - Jaguar
Atari - Lynx
Atari - ST
Bandai - WonderSwan Color
Bandai - WonderSwan
Casio - Loopy
Casio - PV-1000
Coleco - ColecoVision
Commodore - 64 (PP)
Commodore - 64 (Tapes)
Commodore - 64
Commodore - Amiga
Commodore - Plus-4
Commodore - VIC-20
Emerson - Arcadia 2001
Entex - Adventure Vision
Epoch - Super Cassette Vision
Fairchild - Channel F
Funtech - Super Acan
GamePark - GP32
GCE - Vectrex
Hartung - Game Master
Leapfrog - Leapster Learning Game System
Magnavox - Odyssey2
Microsoft - MSX 2
Microsoft - MSX
NEC - PC Engine - TurboGrafx 16
NEC - Super Grafx
Nintendo - Famicom Disk System
Nintendo - Game Boy Advance (e-Cards)
Nintendo - Game Boy Advance
Nintendo - Game Boy Color
Nintendo - Game Boy
Nintendo - Nintendo 64
Nintendo - Nintendo 64DD
Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System
Nintendo - Pokemon Mini
Nintendo - Satellaview
Nintendo - Sufami Turbo
Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Nintendo - Virtual Boy
Nokia - N-Gage
Philips - Videopac+
RCA - Studio II
Sega - 32X
Sega - Game Gear
Sega - Master System - Mark III
Sega - Mega Drive - Genesis
Sega - PICO
Sega - SG-1000
Sinclair - ZX Spectrum +3
SNK - Neo Geo Pocket Color
SNK - Neo Geo Pocket
Tiger - Game.com
VTech - CreatiVision
VTech - V.Smile
Watara - Supervision

[Rion]

@stephanepare Goodtools are absolite. It's best to go with No-Intro instead.

Google is your friend here if you are not part of a larger community cough private trackers cough

Just search for "No-Intro 2017"

[muldjord]

I got my hands on an EmuMovies / gamesdbase API key now (Are they the same? It's a bit confusing). Spend a bit of time checking things out from their demo vb project, and I think I get the gist of the implementation. I will write my own implementation of it and it will then be added to Skyscraper as a scraping module.

[LocVez]

@muldjord Fantastic, looking forward to this :)