Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper

muldjord

@timb I have a guess. Maybe it's because it checksums "no data" (or an error message) because of the way I use the QProcess read or something. It's very hacked. Haven't had time to look properly into this yet, I'm just guessing without having entirely checked your descriptions yet.

timb

@muldjord
I had similar thoughts earlier. An easy way to see if it’s checksumming an error message from 7zip is to entirely suppress all output from it. We can do that with the following flags:

7z e -y -bd -bso0 -bse0 -bsp0 -so

That essentially completely disables console, error and progress output and also answers ‘yes’ to any prompts. It’s the closest you can get to a “-qq” flag. I’ll add that to the source this afternoon, recompile and see if it makes any difference.

No rush on this, by the way. I appreciate you implementing it at all. :)

muldjord

Please git pull and try it again. I've improved it quite a bit and added further error checking. I'm interested in knowing if you still get those weird same-sha1 errors. Also, I've added a 20 meg limit to using the unpacking feature to try and avoid running into mem limitations on the pi. Hopefully this is temporary as I would like it to read chunks instead, but so far I haven't gotten that to work reliably. So it take up the amount of ram the rom takes up on disk to calculate the checksums. And if you run several threads AND the compositor is working with images that spells trouble.

timb

@muldjord

Whatever you did seems to have fixed it! I’ll let you know how the other platforms go (I’ve only tried NES so far). I’m just putting the finishing touches on my script that swaps the SHA1 hashes in the DB files; I want to run it first before scraping the other platforms.

A 20MiB limit seems sensible for now. I don’t think any of my ROMs come close to that. (I keep my N64 stuff uncompressed as the emulator doesn’t support on the fly decompression.)

A Former User

The only time I could see the 20 MiB limit coming in to play is if someone has zipped PSX PBP files. I am unsure if the PSX emulators allow for zipped media though.

muldjord

@livefastcyyoung Yes, it would probably only be relevant for the "newer" platforms such as psx and n64 so I think it'll be ok. Thanks for your input guys, I appreciate all of it!

timb

@muldjord
So once I converted all the hashes in the database with my script, it seems to have successfully scraped everything just fine. Thanks for getting the basics of this feature working! :)

muldjord

@timb Glad it works :) And you're welcome! I'll probably make a release with this in a few days.

SteveW25561

This tool is amazing! Thanks for your work on this, @muldjord

Is there a way to get Skyscraper to scrape ALL of the systems in my RetroPie directory (or a selected set), rather than specifying one at a time? The selph scraper allows you to choose "ALL" or "Selected" systems, and I was looking for the same in Skyscraper but don't see it in the docs.

Also, I just scraped a bunch of MAME games and many of the videos Skyscraper got back were not playable (initial simple mode scrape). I can see altbeast.mp4 (2.8 MB) or centiped.mp4 (928 KB) for example, and they won't play via Mac or on the Pi. Any way to fix this?

muldjord

@stevew25561 Thank you, glad you like it! :) No, there is no way to scrape all platforms, you'll have to script that youself. :)

Did you get those videos from screenscraper or arcadedb? I just scraped centiped from both arcadedb and screenscraper and they play just fine with mplayer. I did notice that it has some weird dimensions because centipede is a vertical game. So I'm guessing it's because EmulationStation has issues with that. Not really something I can fix I'm afraid, as I basically just download the videos and save them as is.

parasven

@muldjord
is there a way to get the media off of screenscraper that actually belong to the scraped game region ? For example there is multiple covers for this game:

007 - The World Is Not Enough:
https://www.screenscraper.fr/gameinfos.php?gameid=102752&action=onglet&zone=gameinfosmedias

The covers are different for different regions of the game. Is it actually possible to get the cover for the german version through skyscraper?

In the source of skyscraper i found following regions:
eu
us
ss
uk
wor
jp

Are there more options for the region parameter?
What do the parameter ss and wor stand for?
wor = world?

muldjord

@parasven If you want the German ones, just use '--region de' I believe it is. 'ss' simply means 'screenscraper' and is a generic region they apply to any media they don't have a region for. The regions listed in the source are just the priority list I use internally. 'wor' just means world I'm guessing. Probably for games that are regionless.

There are many more options, they are listed with this call (Chrome can view this url directly, otherwise save it and open it in a text editor):
https://www.screenscraper.fr/api/regionsListe.php?devid=xxx&devpassword=yyy&softname=zzz&output=xml&ssid=test&sspassword=test

Btw, keep in mind that even though you set '--region de' it doesn't mean it will find german versions of all the covers. It always falls back to the internal regions if the one provided manually can't be found. So you will still see the others for the ones where a 'de' version didn't exist.

parasven

@muldjord
Thank you very much for that list. I found some of these regions by hand with try and error hehe

Love your scraper btw. It is very fast and works like a charm. The localDB is a very cool feature to be honest :)

Used2BeRX

@dorkvader Just noticed this now man.

Damned if I can see your email there though man. Is there something I'm supposed to do when I load your profile? I just can't find it.

SteveW25561

@muldjord Thanks for the reply.

I used the simple mode to scrape so I can't tell what video source they came from. I'll try again in manual mode and specify screenscraper or arcadedb.

Additional questions:

Is there a command to scrape and overwrite just one rom file? For example, I have centiped.zip in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-libretro
What does scraping one rom do to the gamelist.xml file?

Thanks...

muldjord

@stevew25561 You can just put the full or partial path of a rom as the last part of the command line like so:

$ Skyscraper -p [platform] -s [source] --videos /partial/or/full/path/to/romfile.zip

It won't touch the gamelist.xml when you do that. But in order to make use of the data afterwards, you should always rescrape with just:

$ Skyscraper -p [platform] --videos

Which will regenerate the gamelist.xml from all of the locally cached data. This step is also where you can see where the videos are from. It will be listed in the parenthesis.

Also remember that if you always scrape with videos enabled you can just put this in '~/.skyscraper/config.ini'

[main]
videos="true"

Then you won't need to add the --videos every time you scrape. Check more options in the '~/.skyscraper/config.ini.example' file.

dorkvader

@used2berx OK, it should be fixed now. I guess I didn't save the setting to show email.

timb

@stevew25561

For what it’s worth, this is how I scrape multiple platforms:

Skyscraper -p nes -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p snes -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p n64 -s screenscraper -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p gb -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p gbc -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p gba -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p megadrive -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p sega32x -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass && \
Skyscraper -p segacd -s screenscraper --unpack -u user:pass

The && between commands tells the shell to run the next command if the previous command completed without errors. So, in the example above, if the NES, SNES and N64 instances all scrape fine, but the GB instance runs into a problem and quits, the chain will stop there. The \ allows you to split a single command among multiple lines. (It tells the shell to treat the newline as an actual newline, instead of executing the command.)

This is a quick and dirty way to do it, but works fine. I could whip up a short shell script that would be a lot cleaner and allow you to pass it a list of platforms to scrape and args to pass to Skyscraper if you’d like. (Something like this: ./skywrapper.sh -p ‘nes megdrive snes n64’ -wargs ‘-s screenscrapper -u user:pass’)

easye9inches

Ubuntu is new to me and driving me crazy, can someone help. I have my ROMs on an external. I want to scrape the data to the external.

My mount point is /media/usb0

The virtualboy for example, would be: /media/usb0/All ROMs/virtualboy

This is what is confusing me when I goto scrape:

Platform: 'virtualboy'
Scraper module: 'screenscraper'
Input folder: '/media/usb0/’All'
Game list folder: '/media/usb0/’All'
Covers folder: '/media/usb0/’All/covers'
Screenshots folder: '/media/usb0/’All/screenshots'
Wheels folder: '/media/usb0/’All/wheels'
Marquees folder: '/media/usb0/’All/marquees'
Videos folder: '/media/usb0/’All/videos'
Local db folder: 'dbs/virtualboy'

DID YOU KNOW: You can force a refresh of the locally cached data using the '--refresh' option. Skyscraper will then refetch the requested entries from the scraping sources, instead of loading it from cache. Sort of like Ctrl+F5 in a browser.

Forcing 1 threads as this is the anonymous limit in the ScreenScraper scraping module. Sign up for an account at https://www.screenscraper.fr and support them to gain more threads. Then use the credentials with Skyscraper using the '-u [user:password]' command line option or by setting 'userCreds=[user:password]' in '~/.skyscraper/config.ini'.

Looking for optional 'priorities.xml' file in local db folder... Found!
Priorities loaded successfully!

Input folder '/media/usb0/’All' doesn't exist or can't be seen by current user. Please check path and permissions.

muldjord

You need to quote the entire path since you have spaces in it. Otherwise it'll see All roms as two different paths and just stop at All. So basically put in:

$ Skyscraper -p virtualboy -i "/media/usb0/All ROMs/virtualboy" -s screenscraper

But instead of doing that, I would just add this to the ~/.skyscraper/config.ini

[virtualboy]
intputFolder="/media/usb0/All ROMs/virtualboy"

Then you don't have to type it in all the time. Check ~/.skyscraper/config.ini.examplefor more available options, and also check the output of $ Skyscraper --help for all command line options. :)

EDIT: I just realized I've forgotten to add inputFolder as a possible option of the [main] section of config.ini. I'll fix this in the next release. When that's fixed you can add it as:

[main]
intputFolder="/media/usb0/All ROMs"

Then it'll be used as the base for all platforms.