Newish user, have some questions

Kracov

So I’ve been using ES and Retroarch with Windows 7 for over a year now. I’ve looked at some of the documentation. I’ve set up my systems and roms pretty nicely. There are a few minor hurdles that make things difficult.

Where is the newer version of ES? I don’t know how to use github
How do I use a different scraper in ES or update the URL?
How do I remove a game startup error message about razer tartarus not configured? I don’t use it, I use my PS3 controller instead.
Minor annoyance but since I configured retroarch to use analog stick instead of just d-pad, pressing the PS3 controller’s Power button switches to desktop rather than exit the game back to ES.
How do I exit emulationstation with keyboard? Remove the “shutdown computer” options?
I tried installing ES and Retroarch on another computer with Windows 10, but it won’t run at all. Something about a white or black popup box and then nothing.

mitu

@Kracov This forum is mainly about RetroPie, a collection of programs and configurations to configure and manage emulators and ROMs. Emulationstation is just a frontend that's part of RetroPie - which runs only on Linux. So most of the Windows questions are not quite applicable to RetroPie and are specific to your configuration - how you configured your emulators, starting the games from Emulationstation, how did you configure your controllers, etc. - which are not part of RetroPie at all.

To answer to your questions:

RetroPie maintains a fork of Emulationstation mainly for use within the project. If you don't know how to get the source and compile, there are Windows builds of the fork readily available in @jdrassa's release page - https://github.com/jrassa/EmulationStation/releases.
You can use another Windows scraper like Universal XML Scraper, Skraper, Stephen Selph's scraper. Since each scrape source site has its own API/URL scheme, just 'changing the URL' is not enough to make it work.
That's up to your configuration.
Idem
Press F4 to exit ES with the keyboard. To remove the 'Shutdown computer' option, you'll have to modify the program source and re-compile.
For Emulationstation, try the link I posted at 1. For RetroArch use the libretro.com site to download a current release, it runs very well on Win10.

Kracov

Thanks mitu. I'm posting here since there seems to be no emulationstation forum, and I already tried libretro forum for retroarch, and they said they know nothing about ES. Do you know how to use those scrapers from within ES? I've never had to do this, it's just that ES's internal scrapers don't work anymore since servers are gone.

mitu

@Kracov said:

I'm posting here since there seems to be no emulationstation forum...

That's normal, since the main version is not maintained anymore.

I've never had to do this, it's just that ES's internal scrapers don't work anymore since servers are gone.

They're not gone, they just changed their site and the scraping API, so the internal ES scraper is not working anymore. This is fixed in the RetroPie's Emulationstation fork.

Kracov

i installed the new emulationstation but apparently i can't use the keyboard, mouse and controller. i assume i have to reconfigure them? How?

mitu

@Kracov The keyboard should work right of the box, the controller can be configured from the menu, in the Input configuration dialog.

Kracov

the only key that worked was f4. the arrow keys would not scroll down to selec the input config. i did get a COM error message after exiting. i guess i need to reinstall an older version or something.

Clyde

@Kracov Welcome to the forum.

A word of advice, it's more helpful for helpers if you tell them the exact error message instead of just saying that there was one.

If your system was working before, why did you install a new version of ES? Just curious.

Kracov

It only happened once so I didn't get a chance to read it all. COM Surrogate, I think. I didn't technically "install" it as it just contained files and folders and I extracted them from the zip and moved/replaced them in the ES folder. I wanted a new version because I wanted to be able to use the scraper, but I will just try the Selph's scraper etc.

Clyde

@Kracov If it only happened once, but your keyboard doesn't work the whole time, it may have nothing to do with it anyway.

I can recommend Selph's Scraper. I tried some others and returned to it nonetheless.

I can also recommend making a backup before changing things like upgrading the installed software. It makes undoing them much more easy.

Kracov

i could find no windows documentation on selphs scraper. just linux i think.

mitu

@Kracov It's the same documentation as for Linux, it's a command line scraper. There are Windows builds on the Releases page on the Github project that you can use.

Kracov

selph's scraper runs and searches for games but it does not fix the emulationstation games list/images. i even tried to manually edit ES's default gamelist but the metadata and images do not show up i even double checked the paths and everything.

Clyde

@Kracov You could delete or rename the gamelist.xml (e.g. to gamelist.xml.backup) and let the scraper create a completely new one, in case that there's something wrong with the existing one. Selph's Scraper will not scrape existing images and videos anew, so it shouldn't take as much time to scrape only the metadata for a new gamelist.

Kracov

I just tried what you suggested, but selphs scraper still did not fix the missing game images including metadata. Mortal Kombat 3, X-Men, Doom, other popular titles. I assume you are talking about the gamelist in the main ES folder, not the subsequent ones in each system?

Clyde

It depends if you enable the option ROM folder for gamelists & images in Selph's Scraper. I do have enabled it, so my gamelists are located in the rom folders, not in /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists. See https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/#where-are-my-scraped-media-and-metadata-saved about the possible locations.