I get small screenshots with the Skyscraper

Lord Vek

I get small screenshots with the Skyscraper. What commands do I have to put into the artwork.xml to make it magnify them to i.e. 640 x 480 in a picture composed from screenshot, cover and wheel images? If you can give me an example... Thanks in advance.

mitu

Doesn't Skyscraper do that by default ? Are you sure it's not the theme you're using that shrinks the picture size ?
The format for the artwork.xml is documented in the Artwork doc page. There's an example there, but you can take a look at the other example artwork.xml files here.

Lord Vek

@mitu Thanks for the answer. I read the documentation on the pages you suggest but I didn't find (or didn't understand) anything that would help. The theme I am using (Carbon) doesn't shrink the images.

mitu

@Lord-Vek said in I get small screenshots with the Skyscraper:

The theme I am using (Carbon) doesn't shrink the images.

Are you sure ? The md_image tag for the theme has a max_size specified, so it does try to fit the image to certain boundaries. What's your screen resolution ? You can also check the images produced by Skyscraper and see what's their size.

Lord Vek

@mitu !

Picture from my monitor running Retropie

This is how small they are. It is 640x480 in size. Is there a way to make Skyscraper to make them bigger? If, say, I give bigger height and width in artwork.xml, will it stretch them?

mitu

@Lord-Vek I can't see the picture.

Lord Vek

@mitu Try it now, I made it into a PDF file.

Picture from my monitor running Retropie

The screenshot should be 1/4 of the screen.

mitu

@Lord-Vek It's not the file format (image was fine), but your image is not public and requires a Gmail/Google account.

Lord Vek

@mitu Sorry, I didn't notice that. Try it again please, I made it public.

mitu

@Lord-Vek This doesn't look like a Skyscraper created image - at least not with the default artwork.xml.

Can you add some details about your setup - as asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first - and also post the artwork.xml that you have in $HOME/.screenscraper ?

Lord Vek

@mitu
I have a Raspberry Pi 400, powered from the original power supply.
My controller is a chinese knock-off of the XBox controller, and is recognizable from the computers as one.
I used a pre-made SD Image on RetroPie website and when the version changed in 2022 I updated it from inside Retropie, because I have made many changes i.e. I differentiated MSX 2 from MSX, added Samba to be able to connect with a PC.
I erased the files from the build in scraper I had, so I could use Skyscraper which can make composite images and connect to different sources.

This is my artwork.xml. As it is, it creates pictures like the one in the screenshot I sent.

mitu

@Lord-Vek said in I get small screenshots with the Skyscraper:

This is my artwork.xml. As it is, it creates pictures like the one in the screenshot I sent.

The artwork.xml is ok.
Just to make sure, when you're scraping from the source site, are you including covers and marquees in the cache ? If you don't enable scraping for them, Skyscraper cannot include them in the final output.
What source do you use for the cache creation/scraping ? Not all of them may have assets for covers and/or marquees.

Lord Vek

@mitu Depends. If I want to scrape NES or SNES, I would include covers and wheels. For the Arcades I didn't think it was necessary. I try screenscraper mostly and then I try the others, scraping only the Roms for which I didn't find anything on the screenscraper.

mitu

@Lord-Vek said in I get small screenshots with the Skyscraper:

For the Arcades I didn't think it was necessary.

Then how do you expect the final image to include them ?

Lord Vek

@mitu I didn't say that. I ask why the pictures are so small and what I could do to make them bigger.

mitu

@Lord-Vek You said:

What commands do I have to put into the artwork.xml to make it magnify them to i.e. 640 x 480 in a picture composed from screenshot, cover and wheel images?

Your picture looks small because the screenshot is resized to 520x390 in the composed image and the placeholders for cover and marquees are empty.

If you want to have a final picture composed just from screenshot and sized 640x480, then modify artwork.xml to remove the cover/marquee outputs and resize the screenshot output to 640x480:

<artwork>
  <output type="screenshot" width="640" height="480">
    <layer resource="screenshot" width="640" height="480" align="center" valign="middle">
    </layer>

</artwork>

You can probably save this artwork template in a separate file and then instruct Skyscraper to use it for the arcade system by modifying config.init:

...
[arcade]
artworkXml="artwork-arcade.xml"
...

Lord Vek

@mitu Is it so simple then? OK, thank you for your answer and for your time.