Steven Selph's scraper vs EmuStation Scraper, what's the difference?

[DIY_glenn]

Hi!
I just bought a RPi3 and burned RetroPie. I am impressed with how finished it is! I was expecting installing emulators, configuring etc, but everything is there! It's now syncing roms automatically from my home server - perfect!

I like the scraper functionality, but I was a bit confused from the the wiki, as there are two scraping options. Using Steven Selph's scraper, I had to quit EmuStation and run it manually (connect a keyboard etc).
But with the EmuStation option I could control everything from gamepad, which for me makes much more sense. EmuStation also cleaned up the names which Selph's didn't. ("Bubble Bobble (EUROPE)" -> Bubble Bobble").

What's the deal here, any reason for using one over the other?

[3lric]

Selph scraper gets metadata via hash. The built in scraper gets it via system and game name.

Normally i use the Selph scraper first and then fill in the blanks with the built in scraper.

[DIY_glenn]

@3lric Thanks!
How about the names, can Selph's be configured to remove the "(EUROPE)" ++ tags behind the actual name?

[meleu]

I stopped to use the ES scraper because of the issues I exposed here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/85/scraper-optimization
And then started to use the sselph scraper.

If your raspi is connected to your LAN you can log into it via SSH and then use the sselph scraper (don't forget to exit/kill emulationstation anyway).

I think that rename the roms is unnecessary. But if you really want it, maybe it's better to use a custom shellscript.

[3lric]

@DIY_glenn
type scraper -help

use_no_intro_names
or something like that might be what you are looking for. I normally just copy the gamelist over to an excel doc after im done scraping and replace all

(*)</name> to just </name>

this is somewhat sloppy and youd still have to fine tune. another way would be to make a batch file to list all files in a directory (to rename the files themselves rather than what the gamelist calls them, which isnt exactly ideal) and then another to rename from one name to another, but that has its annoyances as well since you have to copy the lists to seperate documents until you finish making your changes and then put them together with a rename before hand. such as

rename "things (year).sms" "things.sms"
exit

I used to do this to rename everything at once but I'm sure there are better ways, as both of these still take a bit of time.

[robertybob]

@DIY_glenn said in Steven Selph's scraper vs EmuStation Scraper, what's the difference?:

@3lric Thanks!
How about the names, can Selph's be configured to remove the "(EUROPE)" ++ tags behind the actual name?

Can't edit, but if you start again you can use the flag

-use_nointro_name=false

https://github.com/sselph/scraper/wiki/Flags

[3lric]

@meleu
renaming isnt necessary with the selph scraper. since its done via hash. the problem i have is that quite a few systems are not yet supported, and dreamcast is only gdi support, not cdi, as well as a few other things.

I mainly just use the ES Scraper to fill in the blanks that Selph Scraper didnt find.

[DIY_glenn]

Thanks!

Are there any plans on integrating the scraper into RetroPie instead of having to use commands with EmuStation stopped?

[herb_fargus]

@DIY_glenn you don't need to use commands, it's already integrated in the setup script: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/scraper

[tehswiftone]

The Emulation Station scraper does a really good job at miss naming games as well. Do not use it.

[DIY_glenn]

@herb_fargus
Yeah, but when I choose "Scrape", it seems to be using EmuStations scraper instead.

I'm trying to make it a bit more kid-friendly, so it's easier for them to scrape when new games are added.

[Lyle_JP]

@DIY_glenn If your kids are already tech-savvy enough to add their own rom files, I bet they could learn the ins and outs of both scrapers with little trouble. Kids aren't afraid of tech and pick it up pretty quick in my experience.

[sselph]

@DIY_glenn If you are adding a couple games and want to scrape those then it might be easiest to use the scraper in ES. You can tell it(or might be the default) to only get games that don't already have an image so would only get the new games and then you could work with it to have it grab the right data. The link @herb_fargus provided shows the options for my scraper and you could choose append and set the naming like you like and save those settings so it could be set up but has more overhead to exit ES, etc.

The differences in my scraper and the one in ES as mentioned above are how the matches take place. They use the same data source but my scraper hashes the ROM data and matches that against a mapping to the ID in thegamesdb instead of using the name as a search parameter. So my scraper is great at quickly and with very little false positives matching lots of ROMs. ES scraper is much better for interactive searching but it is slower and if you just let it run unsupervised you will not be happy.

[allenpie]

I guess I'm doing it the chump way I have been googling the full game name and doing a full rename

One thing I noticed it if it's a game is 2 put it at II and it will find it better
Example Ninja Turtles II will find a copy of the game art
Ninja Turtles 2 won't find the game art

I tend to run both build in the 4.02 I'm only missing Neo Geo as I'm unsure if it's able to pull those?

[Floob]

@allenpie Yes, it can process Neo Geo, it will use the filename (opposed to a hash) as they are effectively Arcade/MAME games.

[virg1]

Quick question, I saw somewhere that Selphs's scraper will not work on external USB drives. If the drive is "properly mounted" using the instructions on the git hub site, will the scraper then work properly? I have not manually changed any folders paths like many have done with some to little success, and I believe ES knows all files are stored on the external USB. Want to try to scraper but affraid to after seeing that note Herb's link a few replies above. Thanks for
Assistance

[BuZz]

@virg1 it should be fine

[virg1]

Thank you BuZz! Going to try the scraper today.