How to edit text on screenscrapers

[MisterBodge]

Howdy All,

Couldn't find an answer to this anywhere.

When scraping videos for retropie there is multiple text showing, including the game description that shows on retropie for each game.....

Soooooo, my question is.

How can this be edited?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

[simpleethat]

@MisterBodge Welcome to the forum!

Any text editor will do fine. I personally like notepad++ in Windows (the XML error-checker plugin I have is super convenient).

The files themselves are called gamelist.xml. I use Skraper to scrape my data and it places the gamelist.xml file in the folder with the roms: home/RetroPie/roms/system_name/gamelist.xml

IIRC the other location that the gamelist.xml files can be found is:
opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists/system_name/gamelist.xml

If you're browsing your RetroPie device over your windows network just ignore everything in the path before "configs" or "roms"

[MisterBodge]

That's buddy...Trying it later, I'll let you know how I get on. Back to watching Stargate Universe.

[MisterBodge]

Thanks...Works like a charm.

[Clyde]

But be sure to backup your edited gamelist.xml, because it may be overwritten the next time you scrape.

I'm not familiar with Skraper, so I don't know if it will write the complete gamelist anew every time like Selph's Scraper (in overwrite mode) and Skyscaper do. But backups are almost never a bad idea. 😉

[MisterBodge]

@Clyde Thanks, really wanted to use it for when I have a bunch a friends around. Thought it would be cool to change the text in games like Ghost and Goblins so it has their names in the game description.

[simpleethat]

@Clyde Skraper defaults to write a new list. I haven't really had occasion to see if it will work otherwise. I like to get my game selection completed and then do the scraping.

EDIT: It looks like Skraper does have the ability to update gamelists. It defaults to backup the existing and create a new one but you can also backup existing and update and several other things.

I really like it, there are a lot of customization options and the UI is fairly intuitive.

If anybody is interest you can check it out here it's currently only available for Windows (what I use) and Linux.

[thelostsoul]

If you edit the XML file with an text editor, make sure to not use any special characters: List of XML and HTML character entity references There are tools which will convert any text to such an XML conform "text", in example this one: ISO-8859-1 set or UTF-8 set.

[simpleethat]

@thelostsoul I always forget about that...

[thelostsoul]

@simpleethat Its a bit tedious to work with XML files directly. A few (nine) days ago I asked exactly this topic: How do you edit the gamelist.xml manually?

There are some interesting replies and tools users are using. I am currently building such a tool for myself too, because there is non for Linux. It will be very limited and compared to them barebones, but I can add new games without headache. I want to add new game mods/romhacks from time to time.

[simpleethat]

@thelostsoul Yeah, it's quite tedious to edit them directly (it's why I try to only scrape once and then do my edits). I did forget about your post. Going back to glance at it I was reminded about ARRM. Maybe I'll check that out to see if I like it.

@MisterBodge if you're on windows there is a tool called ARRM that another user created. I personally haven't played with it yet but people seem to like it.

[Clyde]

@simpleethat said in How to edit text on screenscrapers:

If anybody is interest you can check it out here it's currently only available for Windows (what I use) and Linux.

I tried Skraper yesterday, but for some reason its setup assistant didn't recognize my RetroPie options directory. I'm on Kubuntu 18.04 with mono-complete 4.6.2 installed like its website says. Maybe the beta 8 (or alpha on Linux as said there, although the download file is the same as for Windows) isn't tested thoroughly on Linux?

Anyway, that's off-topic here. I stopped my test because of the above, but maybe I'll open a topic about it here or in the ScreenScraper forum if I'll feel the need, but for now Skyskraper fulfills (nearly) all of my scraping needs. 👍

edit: I also plan to migrate to KDE Neon based on Ubuntu 20.04 in the near future, maybe the problem will vanish on the new system.

[MisterBodge]

@simpleethat I'm using the RPi 4. Thanks for the help got it working perfectly with the text editor on the OS.