Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper

AlCzervik

@muldjord @mitu Thank you both. I just noticed that the payload wasn't passing "genesis" when running via Skyscraper. And yes, same folder for these ROMs so I assume the file name is driving the correct art per @muldjord's comment. And thanks, I'll attempt to force the the genesis game data/network. Thanks again!

muldjord

@AlCzervik Please also check my edits if you haven't seen it. I just added some more.

AlCzervik

@muldjord Got it. Thanks!

Retro

Is there a way to delete the cached information for an individual game? Sometimes the scraper fetches the wrong information for a game and I don't really wanna delete all my cached information for a system just to fix one error.

Cheers!

muldjord

@Retro Yes, you can easily delete the data for a single game with Skyscraper -p platform --cache edit FILENAME

If a game is connected to an incorrect game when using the screenscrapermodule, you should consider reporting it to them, so it gets fixed.

AlCzervik

@muldjord Again, sorry if this is the wrong forum, but are their any tricks to getting Daphne scrapes working properly? I've got Dragons Lair functional, but no art.

muldjord

@AlCzervik And you have tried scraping it with Skyscraper?

AlCzervik

@muldjord Yep, it found data but in Emulation Station it's not showing up. So I don't think the issue is with Skyscraper getting the data, but definitely Daphne stores ROMs differently than other platforms.

muldjord

@AlCzervik And you did generate the gamelist for it after grabbing the data, right?

KN4THX

I am having an issue where screenscraper says states that anonymous users only get 1 thread and I am locked to that but Screenscraper shows my account as having 6 threads and my scrape total on Screenscaper's site continually climbs while I am scraping on my Pi. I edited the config file to use 6 threads and obviously my user:pass is correct or it wouldn't show up on the site. Has anyone had the same trouble?

AlCzervik

@muldjord Yep. Tried it a few times.

muldjord

@KN4THX said in Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper:

I edited the config file to use 6 threads and obviously my user:pass is correct or it wouldn't show up on the site. Has anyone had the same trouble?

You don't need to set threads=6 it will do this automatically when you've added:

[screenscraper]
userCreds="USER:PASS"

Please verify that you have it entered exactly like that in /home/USER/.skyscraper/config.ini. Also please verify what it says when it starts scraping. Something like Starting scraping run on X files using Y threads. Does it say 1 threads or 6 threadsthere?

AlCzervik

@muldjord A few more points. Per the RetroPie Daphne emulator site: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Daphne/ the file structure is a bit different. From EmulationStation I just see 1 game entitled Lair. In the file structure under Daphne, you have two folders: lair.daphne and roms. The lair.daphne folder has the content (videos, screenshots, etc), the roms folder has the lair.zip file. So could that be the cause of the issue?

muldjord

@AlCzervik Oh, so it's not a file called lair.daphne it's a folder, I didn't know that. I don't have any Daphne games, so it would be cool if we could figure this out.

Well, basically I'm guessing, if you enter the roms folder inside the daphne folder, you will probably see the artwork and so on, right? It scrapes the lair.zip file from that folder and that's what's added to the gamelist.

What file do you select to start a game?

AlCzervik

@muldjord I think you're right. I'm sure it's stored 1 level lower as that's where the lair.zip is located. The file I select to start the game is the "Lair" file that is shown via EmulationStation so I assume we need to map the artwork somehow to that top level.

AlCzervik

@muldjord this is what it looks like:

muldjord

@AlCzervik I've been reading up on this and this is actually a bit tricky. EmulationStation actually launches the game when you select a gamename.daphne folder. This is quite unusual. No other platform I am aware of does this. They all launch using files. Skyscraper and other scrapers don't scrape folders, they scrape files, meaning that the gamename.daphne folder is not scraped, which is why you don't have any game information and artwork on it. But, the roms/lair.zip files is scraped, but this file is hidden inside of EmulationStation it would seem.

So I'll need to figure out how to deal with that.

AlCzervik

@muldjord Gotcha. Yeah, Daphne is quite different but once operational it works like a charm. Let me know how I can help troubleshoot/test!

muldjord

@AlCzervik This is now working in 3.5.0 which has just been released. Just update Skyscraper and run Skyscraper -p daphne and it should work without having to rescrape the data. Remember to exit EmulationStation first.

muldjord

Skyscraper 3.5.0 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper

For 'screenscraper', 'thegamesdb', 'mobygames' and 'arcadedb' Skyscraper will now no longer fetch the artworks if user has requested it to remain uncached (Thank you to user 'herbymachine' for the request)
Added '--skipexistingmedia' option to allow for faster gamelist generation in cases where some artwork already exists in the gamelist media folder (Thank you to 'jacrify' for suggesting this)
Added '--flags' command-line option that collects certain flag-like options into one
Added deprecated warnings to all options that are now moved to the '--flags' option
Added '*.cue' extension to '3do' platform (Thank you to 'therealdealneil' for the suggestion)
Implemented a hack for the 'daphne' platform that will add the game info to the 'game.daphne' folders instead of the 'game.zip' files (Thank you to 'AlCzervik' for pointing this out)

Several new features made it into this one that have been a long time coming. For one, when scraping any platform and user has requested any particular artwork resource not to be cached, the artwork will no longer be fetched from the sources either. This saves bandwidth and will provide faster resource gathering. So if you use the --nocovers and so on options (which are now deprecated, read on below), this will be useful to you.
A somewhat similar feature is the option to now skip any artwork generation if the artwork already exists in the media output folder. This can be done with the flags --flags skipexistingTYPEs where TYPE is cover, screenshot and so on. Remember the sat the end, so it's --flags skipexistingcovers. So basically, if the only thing you've changed is the textual data and you want to regenerate the gamelist only with that, you can now skip some or all of the artwork compositing to save a lot of time.

So, this is 3.5.0, and a rather substantial change to the command-line options have also snuck in. I was getting increasingly annoyed with how bloated the Skyscraper --help output was getting. It shows way too many options that are often only used in niche cases. I wanted to do away with that. So all options that do not require a parameter, which means they are basically flags, have now been collected in the --flags FLAG1,FLAG2 option. To see all available flags simply type Skyscraper -p PLATFORM --flags help. I will probably make this a bit smarter in the coming releases. Specifically I want it to only show flags that are relevant in relation to what mode Skyscraper was started in. For instance, if -s MODULEisn't set, it shouldn't show the --flags forcefilename option in the flags help text as it is not relevant when -s MODULEis left out. So it will be a contextual flags help. For now though, it just shows all flags.

@mitu The old options are still there, but should be corrected in the retropie script sometime soon'ish, as I plan to remove them from Skyscraper entirely in a few months. I won't do so without warning of course, but for now they are clearly marked as Deprecated in the Skyscraper --help output. If you want me to I can look over the script myself and see if I can figure out how to migrate them to the new --flags unattend,forcefilename,... format. Let me know what you think.