EmulationStation Scraper NOT Working

stoney66 · 30 Apr 2019, 17:00

@keithk2581 For grins I loaded a new rom to check and its working for me, scrape found 3 results and they are correct. I also use only thegamesdb.

keithk2581 · 1 May 2019, 02:16

Crazy man, I have two of these setup exactly the same way and put together in the same fashion and both have the same issue. Only think I can think of that I did recently was enabled ssh on both. Would that possibly cause this issue? Going to try disabling it when I get home tonight and see what happens. Thanks again to all!

mitu · 1 May 2019, 02:16

@keithk2581 No, SSH has no influence over this. Can you try and get the log file from Emulationstation (now that you have SSH enabled) from /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt and post it to pastebin.com ? Make sure you restart Emulationstation and run the scraper once before getting the log file.

keithk2581 · 1 May 2019, 21:32

ok here it is:

mitu · 1 May 2019, 21:34

The error is something like 'game not found'.

lvl1: 	TheGamesDBJSONRequest - Response had no game data.

What games have you tried to scrape ?

keithk2581 · 2 May 2019, 00:25

Im missing for approx. 173 mega drive games. I have tried to scrape them individually and even changed the name in the input section. but still returned no games found. I even tried just typing one letter into the input field and searching and still returned no games found.

Here is the link for the error log after I scraped for genesis games:

mitu · 2 May 2019, 04:38

@keithk2581 I don't know why it's not working for you, I just tried a few Megdrive games and they work fine when scraping from TheGamesDB. Maybe the names you have for the files are not recognized by the scraping site - what's the name of your ROMs, can you give some examples ?

keithk2581 · 3 May 2019, 00:38

Addams Family, The.gen
Arch Rivals - The Arcade Game.gen
The Aquatic Games starring James Pond and the Aquabats.gen

……...to name a few out of 173. I have even tried to rename them, the file name and by inputting different variants of the name into the search box, but no luck. Don't understand why its not working on mine. Any suggestions on what I could try next?

Thanks again to you all for you assistance, it is truly appreciated.

mitu · 3 May 2019, 04:38

I think that the problem is with the names of the ROMs. If I try to scrape Addams Family, The, no result is found, but if I change the name of the ROM to The Addams Family, the game is found and scraped. It's odd that from over 100 titles, none of them is matched, but they seems to be named in a peculiar way.

As an alternative, you can try skyscraper or scraper - they're external scrapers that use mainly the file contents to scrape and the name of the ROM is not that important.

keithk2581 · 3 May 2019, 12:15

Yes it's very weird, I too, have tried changing the name, but nothing is found still, what's even more weird is that it was working right after the update to 4.4.12 but then suddenly stopped on both of my builds. I guess I'll have to try the other scrapers for now, manually enter each game it missing or format one of my builds and do a reinstall and see if that works. Thanks to all for your assistance, if you can think of anything else, my ears(eyes) are open

keithk2581 · 3 May 2019, 13:21

Other question I just thought of, is there any setting or file or something written in a file like the gamelist.xml file that would prevent the scraper from finding any games?

mitu · 3 May 2019, 14:06

@keithk2581 There is a setting in for saving the metadata in Emulationstation (Save Metadata on Exit) which can be turned off - this way the gamelist.xml is not written, but that's not what happens in your case.
Is your disk full ?

keithk2581 · 3 May 2019, 15:48

Disk does not appear to be full:

https://imgur.com/gallery/63MCfwY

keithk2581 · 5 May 2019, 13:22

So as an experiment, I decided to try a fresh install on a 3rd SD and after all was installed and updated, the scraper did work! Something must be corrupted on my other 2 builds, just don't know what or how or why! Any idea if I can fix this without formatting and starting from scratch or is that my only option?

mitu · 5 May 2019, 13:49

@keithk2581 Try removing any files from ~/.emulationstation/scrapers. TheGamesDB scraper will download some files there on the 1st scrape, you'll have to wait a bit, then it will re-create the files.

keithk2581 · 5 May 2019, 14:53

I'll give it a shot when I get home tonight, thanks!

keithk2581 · 6 May 2019, 02:51

I deleted the files you said, and it works again! Thank you so much for your help!!

keithk2581 · 6 May 2019, 11:25

Only thing I notice now is that it still returns no games found for games I know are on the gamesdb for example, super battleship and wheel of fortune to name 2(Sega genesis), just an issue with the site or my scraper?

mitu · 6 May 2019, 11:42

@keithk2581 Can you find the games on their site ? If not, then maybe there's an issue with the site. What's the complete ROM filename ?

keithk2581 · 6 May 2019, 17:19

Yes the games are on the site, but seems to only be a problem for mega drive/genesis games. Just did a bunch of super nes games with no issue and all of my rims are named in the same fashion. I have all of my genesis games in mega drive folder could that be an issue in regard to the scraping?

Rom names are in this format:
Wheel of Fortune(USA).gen
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle And Friends,The(USA).gen

Both of those are on the games dB but won't scrape even if I manually change the input