EmulationStation Scraper NOT Working

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

mitu · 6 May 2019, 17:56

@keithk2581 said in EmulationStation Scraper NOT Working:

I have all of my genesis games in mega drive folder could that be an issue in regard to the scraping?

It should not, unless they're in a different system on the scraping site. Given that the other ROMs are found, I don't think that's the case.

Wheel of Fortune(USA).gen
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle And Friends,The(USA).gen

There are multiple games with this name - the first has one for Genesis and SegaCD, the 2nd one has one for multiple consoles of the time - NES, SNES, Genesis, GameBoy.

I can take a look to see what's confusing the scraper, but it could also be a bug on the server side.

keithk2581 · 6 May 2019, 23:27

Yeah, trying to figure that out is definitely above my current skill level :). Funny that its only the genesis(mega drive) games, gotta be something about them. My guess would be its on the server side, but who knows. Thanks again for all your help, and to all who have posted, I truly appreciate it.

mitu · 5 Jul 2019, 08:13

It's because of the way TheGamesDB stores the information about platforms (consoles/systems).
The scraper filters the ROM search by Platform=Sega Mega Drive (and rightly so, since the same game is also available on NES/SNES and GameBoy), however the games are in platform=Sega Genesis, which is different (has a different identifier).

If you search on TGDB by Platform='Sega Mega Drive' and the name of the game - let's use The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends as an example - there's nothing returned. However, if you search with Platform='Sega Genesis', there's one game returned (as it should).

I'm not sure right now how this should be handled in Emulationstation, I'm surprised there were only 2 games from your list. I think all US exclusive Genesis games will not be found by the TGDB scraper.

Now, the ScreeenScraper scraper would be able to find them, but right now it's a bit broken because of their SSL settings change.

keithk2581 · 7 May 2019, 10:06

Hmmm, I see. There were more than 2 games, was just giving you an example of the format of the file names of 2 of my roms that wouldn't scrape. Scraper actually worked for 611 of the 784 games i have, plus or minus a few name issues. I guess for now, ill just gradually add them over time manually, like a small project. Thank you so much for everything!

mitu · 7 May 2019, 10:38

@keithk2581 You can try also Skyscraper, it should be at least as efficient as scraper.

mitu · 15 May 2019, 17:36

I submitted a bug report - https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/issues/565 - for this problem, maybe the scraper can be easily modified to search simultaneously in the Genesis and Megadrive systems.

MrJordaaany · 23 May 2019, 08:45

Is this fixed now and in the main build? Or do you still need to source build the experimental release of Emulationstation?

mitu · 23 May 2019, 18:24

@MrJordaaany It's what fixed ?

MrJordaaany · 31 May 2019, 01:24

@mitu The EmulationStation built in scraper. Or do you have to build the experimental release from source. Will this new version be included in 4.5?

mitu · 31 May 2019, 02:37

@MrJordaaany If you use the built in scraper is should have a functional TGDB scraper. Did you scrape from TheGamesDB or from ScreenScraper ? Scraping from ScreenScraper only works on the -dev branch, due to a change on their site.