Test a new data source for sselph/scraper

sselph

Hi,

I started some more development on sselph/scraper. I was asked to add some new data sources and the first one I've added is screenscraper.fr. It is a multilingual and multiregional source so will hopefully be nice for international folks. If anyone wants to test it out and see if the new code is working give it a shot.

I haven't updated the released version but the test code is at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B35kk05UWTo0b2ptT0ZfNGliTWs?usp=sharing

To use the new source you can do
scraper -use_gdb=false -use_ss=true

The new options are -region and -lang. The options for region are us,eu,jp,fr,xx where xx stands for other. You can order them in your preferred order. This will apply to things that have multiple regions and it isn't clear from the ROM what the region is (ie World roms) The options for lang are en,fr,es,de,pt you can provide more that one like -lang="de,en" the data source is mainly french and english at this time.

Known Issues:

I've noticed that a couple systems were missing sha1 data. If you have roms that worked normally but nothing from that system scrape, let me know and I can relay that to the developer. There was a small issue in the import script and it takes a couple minutes to fix.
Scumm and name based systems probably won't work
PSX and bin/cue systems probably won't work

tien_huu_1408

@sselph Hi, I am very interested in using your scraper script. Many thanks for your hard work. If possible, could you integrate 3D box arts and other features( MIX Template function (shadow, layer mask, reflections,...) into Retropie setup script? Something is like the way Universal XML scrapper of @screech with Retropie profile (but it works through windows pc).

Read here: https://github.com/Universal-Rom-Tools/Universal-XML-Scraper/releases/tag/1.5.0.11-Rp

Thanks a lot and wait for your good news!

sselph

The option to download the 3D box art is there. For the cool looking composite image, technically it would be possible but I haven't looked in to it at all.

sselph

I went ahead and released the new code. This isn't the default source and disabled by default.

PS I took a minute to play around with image processing in Go and it is pretty neat. I was able to merge the images together similar to what @screech was doing so definitely possible but I have no clue how I would easily add some template functionality and all that. I am considering refactoring the image portion of the code so will keep this in mind. So if I do add something, it will be easier.

DrMaxwell

Nice to see you back at it and screenzone.fr are a great source for the databases. They have some excellent tools for metadata and media on their website.

Download Scraper for your respective OS

Roms Move or copy the scraper to the roms subdirectory for the system you want to scrape. For example: //roms/snes/
ImagesPlace matched images into system subfolder named images. For example: //roms//snes/images/
Use the command below to scrape metadata and match images without downloading images and keeping them in png format that Raspberry Pi plays nicely with.

scraper -add_not_found=true -append=true -download_images=false -image_dir="images" -image_path="images" -image_suffix="" -img_format="png" -no_thumb=true -thumb_only=false -thumb_suffix="" -use_gdb=true -use_ss=true -use_ovgdb=true -workers=4

lilbud

Will you add the libretro thumbnails as a scraper source?

Pyjamarama

Does SScraper (running in Windows) need a special parameter for FBA? (for MAME the -mame parameter is used)

sselph

@DrMaxwell Nice to see you again.

@lilbud https://github.com/sselph/scraper/issues/102 The issue was that I assumed data sources would handle both metadata and images so having a source just for images was something that requires more work.

@Pyjamarama With my limited knowledge of MAME and arcade I called the flag -mame but it goes for all arcade systems like fba, neogeo, etc.

DrMaxwell

@sselph I assume you have documented any and all new options in the help section of the program:

scraper --help

How can people access 3D versus 2D versions of art from the screenzone database?
I've noticed if all three databases are set to true, the metadata is more complete; is there an order or hierarchical preference that the scraper pulls this metadata from?

Thanks for the further development of this tool. Your scraper is the fastest in the business!

sselph

Yes -help should have it. -console_img="b" is the default which is 2D boxart -console_img="3b"would get the 3D boxart. Right now the order is gdb, ss, ovgdb but I need to rework some of this to handle specifying the order.

DrMaxwell

@sselph I think having a preference would be good. Silly question, but does the scraper check against all three sequentially; for example, if the first doesn't provide the metadata, then it goes to the next database until both image and metadata are found?

sselph

@DrMaxwell Thats the idea but it might stop without getting an image and only metadata. I can't remember.

tien_huu_1408

@sselph I like this mix template for scraping. How could you do this? Could you integrate into your script option? Thanks a lot!

tien_huu_1408

@sselph Any update for the script?

paradadf

@sselph it is amazing how fast SS as a source is!!!

I notice two things while using it though...

I can't scrape any arcade games (mame, fba, neogeo)
With one specific gba rom I get always the following error message and the scraper stops:

2016/10/03 13:36:15 INFO: Checking for new hash.csv.
2016/10/03 13:36:15 INFO: hash.csv "e2315a44c3d4c5d200477a109e079f29" up to date.
2016/10/03 13:36:15 INFO: Starting: gba\2 Game Pack! - Matchbox Missions - Emergency Response + Air, Land and Sea Rescue (USA).zip
2016/10/03 13:36:16 ERR: error processing gba\2 Game Pack! - Matchbox Missions - Emergency Response + Air, Land and Sea Rescue (USA).zip: image: unknown format
2016/10/03 13:36:16 INFO: Starting: gba\2 Game Pack! - Matchbox Missions - Emergency Response + Air, Land and Sea Rescue (USA).zip
2016/10/03 13:36:16 ERR: error processing gba\2 Game Pack! - Matchbox Missions - Emergency Response + Air, Land and Sea Rescue (USA).zip: image: unknown format
2016/10/03 13:36:16 INFO: Starting: gba\2 Game Pack! - Matchbox Missions - Emergency Response + Air, Land and Sea Rescue (USA).zip
2016/10/03 13:36:16 ERR: error processing gba\2 Game Pack! - Matchbox Missions - Emergency Response + Air, Land and Sea Rescue (USA).zip: image: unknown format
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal 0xc0000005 code=0x0 addr=0x20 pc=0x407bc7]

goroutine 28 [running]:
panic(0x81cd20, 0xc0420040b0)
        /usr/local/go/src/runtime/panic.go:500 +0x1af
main.crawlROMs.func2(0xc04340c010, 0xc043408000, 0x0, 0xc042a8dfe0, 0xc0425e9980, 0xc042a971c0)
        /home/sselph/go/src/github.com/sselph/scraper/scraper.go:281 +0x247
created by main.crawlROMs
        /home/sselph/go/src/github.com/sselph/scraper/scraper.go:314 +0x8c7

lilbud

Can you enable scraping games that are on an external drive.

DrMaxwell

@lilbud Just put the scraper executable in the same folder as your roms; whether or not the drive is external is irrelevant.

sselph

@paradadf Thanks. I found the issue and have it fixed on github. I wasn't passing the error returned when the bad image was found and caused it to crash when using -missing. I can't reproduce the image error. Maybe that game was fixed? or it was temporary. I also only set this up to scrape console games. I didn't do arcade since it uses names instead of hashes and hadn't done any testing on that.

paradadf

@sselph the rom works perfectly, so I don't understand what's the problem.
Anyway, I just noticed that the letters with accents á, é, ó, etc... aren't being shown on the xml file (those letters are just erased).

Nightfire

Hi @sselph, happy to hear you're working on the scraper again, I've used it every time I've worked with RetroPie. Not sure if you had seen recent development news of RetroPie, but they are working on emulators for PSP (ppsspp), Nintendo DS (desmune) and GameCube (dolphin). So, I was wondering, will you be adding support for scraping PSP/NDS/GameCube games? Or is there a way to scrape for those systems that I'm just not aware of?