Skyscraper not writing to mounted emulationstation NAS folder

beatbox32

Okay, I'm stumped.

To aggregate all of my ROMS/media and free up space on my RPI4 SD card, I've decided to move the associated media from the on-board
/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation folder to my NAS (Synology DS412+). I've had the ROMS mounted there for some time and have had no issues playing games. But now when I'm scraping for metadata using Skyscraper, it doesn't seem to be writing any actual files or creating directories, though it thinks it is.

Here's what I use to mount the drive:

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=retropie,password=*REDACTED*,nounix,noserverino,gid=1000,uid=1000 //csm_nas/ROMs/home/pi/.emulationstation /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation

I can make directories and create files from the CLI (as pi user), so it doesn't appear to be a permissions issue. Not sure what I'm missing here and hoping someone can point out the errors of my ways.

Thank you!

muldjord

@beatbox32 said in Skyscraper not writing to mounted emulationstation NAS folder:

it doesn't seem to be writing any actual files or creating directories, though it thinks it is.

Without knowing the specifics of your setup, I'm guessing you have configured Skyscraper to place those files in a different location. The default location is /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/PLATFORM/media.

beatbox32

@muldjord Thanks for the assist! It seems this is where my RetroPie installation defaults to:

------------------------------------------
Running Skyscraper v3.6.6 by Lars Muldjord
------------------------------------------
Platform:           'ngp'
Scraping module:    'screenscraper'
Input folder:       '/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ngp'
Game list folder:   '/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/ngp'
Covers folder:      '/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ngp/covers'
Screenshots folder: '/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ngp/screenshots'
Wheels folder:      '/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ngp/wheels'
Marquees folder:    '/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ngp/marquees'
Videos folder:      '/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ngp/videos'
Cache folder:       'cache/ngp'

Fetching limits for user 'beatbox32', just a sec...

The home/pi/.emulationstation is a symbolic link:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 pi   pi      42 Feb  6 16:00 .emulationstation -> /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation

mitu

So far everything looks ok. If you wish the artwork to be saved in the ROMs folder, you need to enable to enable the option use the ROM folders for gamelists and media before gamelist generation step - see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/#where-are-my-scraped-media-and-metadata-saved and https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/#using-scraper.

muldjord

@beatbox32 Everything looks good, including your mount. Did you remember to re-generate the gamelists from the RetroPie Skyscraper script? Scraping the data simply add it to the Skyscraper cache located at /home/pi/.skyscraper/cache (which is also a symbolic link if you installed Skyscraper from the RetroPie script). But you need to re-genereate the gamelists for it to create the necessary ES gamelist.xml files and artwork files in the /home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ platform folders.

Remember to push space for each platform when generating the gamelists to select them.

EDIT: Skyscraper also checks if gamelist.xml is writable before it starts. It won't run unless it is.

beatbox32

@muldjord said in Skyscraper not writing to mounted emulationstation NAS folder:

@beatbox32 Everything looks good, including your mount. Did you remember to re-generate the gamelists from the RetroPie Skyscraper script? Scraping the data simply add it to the Skyscraper cache located at /home/pi/.skyscraper/cache (which is also a symbolic link if you installed Skyscraper from the RetroPie script). But you need to re-genereate the gamelists for it to create the necessary ES gamelist.xml files and artwork files in the /home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/ platform folders.

Remember to push space for each platform when generating the gamelists to select them.

EDIT: Skyscraper also checks if gamelist.xml is writable before it starts. It won't run unless it is.

Boom! Now it's working. Many thanks for the education on how the cache system works. I think I had a few missteps along the way where I was mounting the media folders as root and not the pi user, running into write issues initially. Once I resolved that, I apparently forgot to re-generate the gamelist.

All good now. Thanks again!

-beatbox32