Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots

herb_fargus

@meleu alright I've taken some of your changes and just tweaked it a bit, and modified the original post. It seems to be working with my tests.

There may have been a slight lag either because I was taking screenshots too fast or I exited before it could be saved properly so it saved a screenshot from a couple seconds earlier rather than my latest one, so I'll have to look into that a little further. If you don't take a ton in a short period of time it seems to work as intended.

Also if anyone else cares, if you set it to 16:9 in the retroarch.cfg your screenshots will also be 16:9 rather than 4:3

meleu

@herb_fargus
I was thinking about this trick again and realized one thing:

When using this trick, the user can't get screenshots for any other purpose.

The runcommand-onend.sh will delete the screenshots.

While we don't make a workaround for this, I think it would be appropriate to add this warning at the first post disclaimers.

herb_fargus

@meleu They can as long as they change the screenshot directory to somewhere else other than the images folder within a rom folder.

hiulit

This tutorial could make a great entry in the RetroPie Wiki! What do you guys think?

herb_fargus

@hiulit perhaps once I've cleaned up the code a bit more, might even be able to make a module of sorts perhaps, idk. Id also like for 4.0 to be released before adding something like this.

hiulit

@herb_fargus Yeah sure, no rush! Just thinking out loud. Great work, btw!

meleu

@herb_fargus

@meleu said

When using this trick, the user can't get screenshots for any other purpose.

If they change the screenshot directory, they are not using this trick. :-)

herb_fargus

@meleu its a fair point. how I envisions it is that people will just go through their gamelist once to get titleshots and then disable it or something. Idk, thats what I did anyways ha ha

meleu

@herb_fargus
BTW: I'm working on RetroArch code to implement what is said here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2483/screenshot-with-rom-name
If it works as expected and the libretro guys accept my PR (not submitted yet), we must adapt this trick. Then, let's wait before the wiki...

herb_fargus

@meleu that would save a step ;) I think there are others that would be happy for that implementation as well

meleu

@herb_fargus
When I was playing with RetroArch code I found that there is an option named auto_screenshot_filename.

As far as I understood, if this flag is set to "true" in retroarch.cfg, the screenshot filename is always Game Name.png, therefore it overwrites the old screenshot. It would be a really really nice feature for the trick we want to do here. Because we could turn on/off the trick based on auto_screenshot_filename flag.

The only problem is: I didn't get it working!

I made some tests here and it seems to be ignored by RetroArch. What a pity...

Sorry for this good followed by a bad news...

herb_fargus

@meleu that auto screen name thing would be ideal.

If the filename retains the date and time that will require a bit more logic to clean for the filenames when scraping. Its a step in the right direction though

meleu

Oh! But I have good news now:
My PR was merged! Let's update RetroArch from source!! :D

Now we have a problem here... our trick here will be incompatible soon. And if we adapt to fit the changes in the screenshot names, it won't be useful for outdated versions of RetroArch...

Oh god! Good followed by a bad news again... :-/

[EDIT: well, maybe if we adapt the RegEx to get the timestamp instead of the "RetroArch" string it can work as we want. I'll take a look at it later...]

herb_fargus

@meleu simple enough fix, just have both versions or add a disclaimer for people to update from source - or we could figure out that extra setting ;)

meleu

@herb_fargus said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

@meleu that auto screen name thing would be ideal.

damn! You hit me! I'll check what's wrong with the auto_screenshot_filename option and try to make it work!

meleu

@herb_fargus
Man! What a shame!

facepalm

Actually the auto_screenshot_filename flag does his job very well!!

The trailing timestamp is what the "auto" means! If you want a screenshot with the "ROM Name.png" only, you just have to set auto_screenshot_filename to false (the default is true).

Our script here can take advantage of this feature!

herb_fargus

@meleu so you mean it worked this whole time? :P ha ha that's funny. Ok well I'll give it a test once I get some time to compile retroarch

meleu

@herb_fargus said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

@meleu so you mean it worked this whole time? :P ha ha that's funny. Ok well I'll give it a test once I get some time to compile retroarch

yeah man! it works even before my PR was merged. There is no need to compile retroarch to get those changes I made, because the auto_screenshot_filename = "false" is what we want! My changes only takes effect when auto_screenshot_filename = "true", and the default (if this option aren't in retroarch.cfg) is true.

We can adapt the "take and scrape your own screenshots" trick to work only when the auto_screenshot_filename = "false". I'm at work now, but I check it as soon as get in home...

herb_fargus

@meleu heh talk about an over engineered solution well regardless a bug was still fixed as a result so good job :) I'll see if I can update it. Maybe there's a way I can have it automatically generate folders and/or configs this time around- perhaps maybe come up with a module for it or something

herb_fargus

@meleu

Alright here's a prelimnary more or less untested psuedo code for runcommand-onend.sh:

# Variables
system="$1"
imgdir="$HOME/RetroPie/roms/$system/images" 

# check if images folder exists for each system, if not create it

if [[ ! -d "$imgdir" ]]; then
    mkdir $imgdir
fi

####### Possible configs to automate potentially with inifuncts?

#### overall retroarch.cfg in /opt/retropie/configs/all:

# Hotkey config to take screenshot with controller
input_screenshot_btn = "12"

# This makes sure the screenshot filename is named ROM NAME.ext
auto_screenshot_filename = "false"

#### system based retroarch.cfg in /opt/retropie/configs/$system/

# Add screenshot per system directory
screenshot_directory = "$HOME/RetroPie/roms/$system/images/"

Really if you take out the automation, the runcommand-onend.sh is really no longer necessary, the user just has to manually edit 3 things:

create an images folder for each system they are scraping with
specify the screenshot directory in each system based retroarch.cfg e.g. screenshot_directory = "$HOME/RetroPie/roms/$system/images/"
add the auto_screenshot_filename = "false" to the main retroarch.cfg

Just thinking out loud but it should be simple enough to use inifuncts with this recent change:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/commit/7d806d52e9fc55fd557cd4a7f931df6e07509bf3

(a little more discussion on it here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3285/i-think-we-finally-have-a-solution-for-rgui-fans/11)

I'm just unsure if we have to initialise the inifuncts script on its own in the runcommand-onend since its technically already initialised here:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/406728c368d038270651159430ded40a92df2649/scriptmodules/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh#L57

but then again variables like the $romdir $rootdir etc are initialised in the retropie_packages.sh which are obviously used in the main runcommand.sh but aren't initialised in the runcommand-onend.sh

anyways what I'm saying is the variables are all already in the code, we may just have to call inifuncs.sh and retropie_packages.sh, or duplicate code to initialise the variables manually. idk. just ideas.