Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper

movisman

Hi there,

Thanks for the info. I stayed up late last night to try and get my systems scraped from the command line, and generally I had very good success.

Using a platform specific variant of the same command line for each system, I managed to scrape all of the obvious ones that have common .zip filenames with no issue at all. Others systems were a bit more picky, especially with me using .chd on all supported emulators, but I was able to sort with manual lookups and some file renaming to fool the scraper into obtaining the correct data.

A few of them incorrectly picked the wrong region for the game, for example Contra Hard Corps (USA) on Megadrive was picked up as Probotector, which is the European name. I haven't played around with the region forcing flags yet though. This is the next thing for me to tackle/address. Luckily there are only a few which have completely different names.

The only platform I had major issues with was the Amiga.

I was happy to do a manual lookup for every game (or any which do not pick up automatically). As there are about 20 in total so it won't take forever, and once it's done it's done. The plan was to do a manual lookup on a valid SHA1 and have it write to the localdb. I did a couple of tests and got a match on screenscraper. I was then going to scrape the localdb so it could write the changes to the gamelist.xml, but for Amiga only, this was just not happening. Using the same command (but changing platform and directory to suit) on another system, it was writing just fine. So I have no idea what is going on, i'll find the commands I used and paste them here.

Thanks for the heads up about having 'cd32' in the filename, some of the titles do not have this. I will also look into trying openretro.

movisman

@muldjord

Hi,

I think I solved the problem with Amiga. My CD32 files run from *.cue files (which is the most common for this system I think), and I had a suspicion that maybe the scraper wasn't supporting them.

So I added *.cue to an Amiga specific config.ini, and then scraped again from the local db.

It pulled the file straight in!

As a request, can you add *.cue support to Amiga possibly? Those who run CD32 will pretty much only use .cue files to launch I reckon.

Cheers!

movisman

@muldjord

One other question from me, do you think you might ever incorporate a function into the scraper where it is able to 'detect' the region?

I used a beta version of "Skraper" on my previous installation, which uses screenscraper.fr only, and this has a tick option in the GUI called "Use ROM region first (when available)", and then it has a free text priority list underneath, where you can put US, EU, etc - which I guess it uses if it cannot work out the ROM region itself.

When this option is ticked, any US roms I have get US artwork and naming, and EU ones get EU artwork and naming, etc, etc. It happens automatically, and seems generally very accurate.

I don't know how it works it out, maybe it uses information from the existing filename or something, not sure. But either way, is this something you could potentially incorporate as an additional switch, rather than having a fixed priority list?

I could use Skraper again, but I like the compositor and artwork style on yours better and prefer scraping from the command line as Skraper doesn't really work on Linux yet. And the fact I can use an SHA1 value as a one time override is excellent.

Cheers!

mitu

@movisman Skyscraper already has a switch to choose the region --region and even the language (--lang) for the sources that supports it.

movisman

@mitu

Hi there,
No worries, but that wasn't really what I was referring to - I know about the switch to set a region and have used it to set to US first, but Skraper has an option to set the region by rom somehow - before using a priority. It means my mixture of EU and US games get picked up correctly on a single scrape, whereas with skyscraper you have to explicitly set a region for the scrape or leave as the default priority (EU first). So it is an all or nothing approach, which doesn't work so well if you have say, a megadrive folder with both EU and US ROMs.

Does that make sense?

mitu

@movisman said in Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper:

Does that make sense?

I understood your request in the first place, I didn't know if you were aware of the command line switches to choose region/language.

muldjord

@movisman I don't currently plan to change the existing region and language functionality. Currently it has a prioritized list it tries. If you set one manually it will move that region og language to the top of that list.

I have added .cue to the list of default supported files for Amiga.

movisman

@mitu

No worries, I thought there was some confusion, but thanks for the heads up, and as always, thanks for helping.

movisman

@muldjord

Perfect, thanks for adding .cue to the list of files.

No worries about the region functionality, if that won't change in the foreseeable future, I could always pop the EU games in another directory, scrape as US, move the EU games back, then scrape again as EU but use the switch to skip the previously scraped files. That should work...

I wonder how Skraper does it, perhaps it looks at the filename and makes a judgement. I have no idea but it does work quite well.

Cheers for all of the help so far.

muldjord

@movisman Can you give me examples of your filenames? I've decided to implement the region override (after a bit of thinking I realized this was a pretty easy thing to implement). But I need filename examples of how they are designated. For instance, are they called "Gamename (Europe).zip"? or maybe "Gamename (eu).zip"?

EDIT: The implementation is done now. I've implemented it so it looks for "europe", "usa", "japan", and "world" in the filename, but only if it comes after the first "(" and the user hasn't manually set the "--region" flag. It will then add that region to the top of the priority list automatically.

EDIT2: @movisman Skyscraper 2.8.2 now tested and released, please update and test out the region detection. You should get the artwork from the region that's in the filename if they are from the above mentioned regions.

muldjord

Skyscraper version 2.8.2 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper

Now autodetects region from filename and prioritizes it when scraping with "screenscraper" unless user has forced region with "--region" option (thank you to "movisman" for suggesting this)
Fixed issue where "wheel" artwork would not be fetched for specified region even though it exists
Added ".cue" file extension to Amiga

movisman

@muldjord

Amazing!! Thank you for implementing this!
I have been out this evening, but will give it a go shortly and let you know.

You are correct, most of the files are (Europe), (USA), (Japan), and (World). Some are a combination, eg. (US, Europe) - I guess in this instance it should scrape the US one.

Will let you know shortly how it goes. I'll test on one of the folders which has these brackets on every file (megadrive + snes).

Cheers

muldjord

@movisman For the ones with (Europe, USA) or similar, it will look for the first one first, then the second one and so forth. So in this examples it would look for 'eu' first. And if that isn't found, it will look for 'us'. And if that isn't found, it will go back to it's original prioritization.

movisman

@muldjord

Just tried Megadrive, and the good news is it works way better, it is picking up the region as you specify above.

However, something I noticed previously which seems to be the same here, is some (Europe) games scraped as EU have the US marquee for some reason. Three examples:

Another World (Europe) - shows the 'Out Of This World' logo, which is US
Thunder Force IV (Europe) - shows the 'Lightening Force' logo, which is US
Chaos Engine, The (Europe) - shows the 'Soldiers of Fortune' logo, which is US

The box is the European type, so that's good - it's just the marquee which displays incorrectly.

Does this need the same treatment with the region autodetect you implemented?

I don't believe this is a screenscraper.fr issue, because if I scrape these with skraper, the marquees are all detected as the correct EU ones. Also if I do a manual lookup, say on Another World, you can see the 'wheel' lists the Europe and US logo correctly, as does marquees etc.

Thanks!

muldjord

@movisman Probably because they are cached and therefore not rescraped. Try scraping with '--refresh'.

movisman

@muldjord

Yep I was just editing my post to say I have already refreshed with --refresh.

muldjord

@movisman The method I've implemented concerns all data that has a region, so it should work for all types.

I'll need to look into this. "Another World" is probably a good examples to test it with, so I'll try that.

movisman

@muldjord

Command used for testing:

/opt/retropie/supplementary/skyscraper/Skyscraper --unattendskip --refresh -g /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/megadrive -o /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/megadrive/media --relative -p megadrive -s screenscraper -u username:password --videos

username:password was filled out correctly of course.

Cheers

muldjord

@movisman Just tested with "Another World (Europe)" for snes. It works as expected. I don't get the "Out of this world" wheel. And if I force us region it also correctly shows the "Out of this world" resources. I'm not sure what could be causing your issue. Have you perhaps scraped the platform with other sources aswell? It might use the artwork from cache from other sources.

EDIT: It seems like SS is down at the moment? I can't scrape anything from it right now. It worked just a few minutes ago.

EDIT2: It's working again it seems. Odd.

movisman

@muldjord

Hi,

No I have only scraped against screenscraper.fr so far, as it has pretty much everything I need, and if it's missing a video I obtain one and submit it. Maybe I could clear the db folder out for megadrive.

I was working with the Megadrive version of Another World, perhaps that version is worth a try?

Or any of the above three examples maybe?

Cheers