Versatile C++ game scraper: Skyscraper
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Yeah, so video howtos ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Just spend 4 hours in video recording hell and I am not going back. It is clearly not where my talent lies. Deleted everything, too inconsistent and... frankly, crap. I'm just about ready to throw my computer out the window. Not going to, but man, the guys on Youtube who knows how to do this? Mad respect from me. It is friggin' HARD! So many details go wrong all the time. Stumbling over words, forgetting commands, technical problems, having to reset all the time after each "take"...
Just trying to figure out decent examples of what I want to convey in the videos is really, really difficult.
If anyone wants to help out on this front, let me know.
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@Used2BeRX Basically Skyscraper is "feature complete" as of 1.7.4. I have implemented the "import" scraper which allows anyone do import their own data (artwork and textual) and define the format in the '[homedie]/.skyscraper/import/definitions.dat' file. I recon an importer for your data can be made from this so feel free to do so.
Aside from reported bug fixes, I'm gonna take a break from the project now, the requests are getting very specific, which is fine, but a lot of it is beyond the scope of what I want for Skyscraper. The importer was made in a way so that it can fit basically any custom format of information, as long as they are contained in single text files and artwork files named after the roms you wish to scrape.
Everything is detailed in the github readmes, so feel free to check those out.
That is all for now. :)
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@muldjord Could you improve the way neogeo games are handled? Results are pretty bad, since naming of neogeo roms is like mame roms. For example you cant scrape mslug.zip or sonicwi3.zip. They dont match with Metal Slug or Aero Fighter/Sonic Wings 3. And in this case you cant unzip them. It would be a mess.
EDIT: I just read that you take a break, so nvm!
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@AnalogHero Actually that is the one thing I would like to work on. I even created the mamemap.csv file for this purpose some time back. All I need to do is to look up the name in that file before scraping and use that instead of the actual filename. I'll think about it over the next couple of days and try to work it in. If it works well, I'll release it with 1.7.5 sometime soon.
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Skyscraper 1.8.0 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper
- Added 'arcadedb' scraper module with video support
- Vastly improved scraping of 'neogeo' and 'arcade' platforms in general by mapping the filenames to real names from mameMap.csv
- Improved 'neogeo' and 'arcade' search platform matching
Apparently my idea of taking a break from a project is to keep working on it... :D Anyways, 1.8.0 is here! And the big news this time around is vastly improved scraping of 'neogeo' and 'arcade' and also a new scraping module using the data from http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/ . This module also supports video!
Enjoy!
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@muldjord Just compiled it and rescraped my neogeo roms. 100% match first try. Thank you!
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@AnalogHero Glad it works now :)
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@muldjord Sounds good man. Sorry I couldn't get those synopsis files to you yet. I'm still working on them. "Real Life" has become abnormally busy for me for the foreseeable future to. I'm still working on stuff in my down time, but it's nowhere near the pace of the last few months.
Maybe by the time things calm down for me and you take a nice long break from your own work we could put our heads together on this when I have the synopsis files ready for the NES. So far there are around 2,100 games accounted for, and there will likely be around 2,250 when I'm done I'm guessing.
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Skyscraper 1.8.1 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper
- Added 'rating' scraping to 'thegamesdb'
This is a minor one, just wanted to get it out there. :)
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Is there any of the databases that removes articles such as the or a and puts it at the end? Something like "Legend of Zelda, The". Roms are already named like this under the goodtools, but somehow that's undone by every scraper I find and I'm this close to manually editing the xml file manually to fix the names
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@stephanepare None that I know of, but The Games DB which is the built in EmulationStation scraper does allow for anyone to update it. You just have to create an account on the site.
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Oh, I was also wondering if it would be possible to add the colecovision and pc engine console to the list of supported platforms
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@stephanepare Yes, Skyscraper automatically moves "The" to the end of names to make sure they are sorted correctly.
I will look into including colecovision and pc-engine soon. It's easily done. Thanks for the feedback.
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Hi @muldjord and thanks for the amazing job!
I've read your arguments about adding zip file support and would really appreciate you to reconsider.
The compression standards idea doesn't matter if you use no-intro romsets, which are pretty much the standard. It is not usual at all that you have more than one rom inside the zips too. People that have very large collections do save tons of space. Even if you you just have few roms, that should apply most of time for every single file. and even if you still think it is not the best to have compressed roms, there are lots of people that have a different opinion and right now they would need to do much stuff manually.
Best regards and thanks for bringing another scraper to the game! -
I don't suppose it would be possible to have an 'all' option for the -s switch that goes through every scraper for you for your selected system and then does the localdb one last to tie all results from all scrapers together?
I'm just not sure if I sould be overwriting the gamellist.xml and skipping games that already exist or not to try and get as complete a collection as possible and should I be running localdb after every other scraper finishes or can I continue using every scraper.
Thanks in advance.
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@paradadf I agree, I'll add zip support for all platforms.
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@LocVez I suggest simply scripting it to do so. That's what I do myself. :) And yes, just overwrite the gamelist.xml for each runthrough and don't ever skip. If you skip existing it won't add the resources for the games that have already been found. So overwrite, never skip.
When you run it with localdb last, it will create a "perfect" one using all resources from earlier scrapings. :)
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Skyscraper 1.8.2 released: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper
- Added support for 'coleco' platform
- Added support for 'pcengine' platform
- Added zip support to all platforms per request from users
2 new platforms added and support for zip files for all platforms. :)
Have fun!
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Just tried this out for the first time by scraping my NES collection.
Wasn't terribly pleased with how it came out so I wanted to get rid of everything and rescrape with a different scraper. However, no matter what I do, I can't get rid of the descriptions and images this downloaded.
I have deleted the gameslist and downloaded_images from /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation. There is nothing in those folders but the images and descriptions still show up in EmulationStation.
I have rebooted. Is there anywhere else these are stored? Thanks!
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@livefastcyyoung Read the readme. It's all well described in there. If you check the output of Skyscraper at the beginning, you'll also notice where the data is saved.
Concerning your trouble with descriptions you don't like, you can either delete the entire local nes database cache by deleting '~/.skyscraper/dbs/nes' and start over. I wouldn't do that though, I instead recommend simply finding out which source you prefer to have the descriptions coming from, and prioritizing that source for description in '~/.skyscraper/dbs/nes/priorities.xml', and then scrape using '-s localdb' afterwards.
Feel free to ask further questions, but please read the readmes thouroughly first. :) Thanks.
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