Where does Emulation Station get the rom names (descriptions) from?

FlightRisk

I copied a set of NEOGEO roms into the correct folder and went back into Emulation Station. It had very long names for all the roms, basically listing their Japanese name and the English equivalent. I looked at all the gamelist.xml files I could find and they don't have any of that information in there. How did it find the names of these roms? There must be a universal gamelist.xml file that has names for every game for every supported emulator? I never ran a scraper. Where can I find that file to edit it? Or is it reading it directly out of each rom somehow? If so, is that human readable text somewhere?

thelostsoul

@flightrisk I asked this myself too. If I remember right, unscraped Mame/Arcade games have a longer name than filename only. In short: I don't know.

HurricaneFan

@flightrisk There is an xml file in EmulationStation that has all the names available for MAME. These names only show up if you haven't scraped the roms yet.

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/master/resources/mamenames.xml

FlightRisk

@hurricanefan, @thelostsoul Got it! I could not find that for the life of me. I tried a scrape using Steve's scraper and it worked ok, but the descriptions were a mess with question marks where the author inserted new lines with escape codes. And the videos won't work. I seem to remember that I have to either disable the OSX(?) media player or use Handbrake to resample every one of the videos. Getting there! BTW, hurricane, are you in NC?

Clyde

@flightrisk said in Where does Emulation Station get the rom names (descriptions) from?:

I seem to remember that I have to either disable the OSX(?) media player or use Handbrake to resample every one of the videos.

A typical problem are videos in yuv444p format that OMX player doesn't support. You can convert them to yuv420p with these scripts:

Batch convert YUV 4:4:4 videos to YUV 4:2:0 in Retropie/Linux (very simple, but gets the job done, if you know what you're doing)
RetroPie Convert Videos (way more sophisticated with many options)

FlightRisk

@clyde Interesting. It seems that the MAME video capture feature records videos using a codec that isn't supported on any standard systems including Windows 10. So the Selph scraper gets data for NeoGeo anyway, gets data where the video snaps are incompatible with the OMX player and text descriptions that display Question marks at the end and in between paragraphs.

In particular progettoemma has the offending files. I used Handbrake as you said to batch re-encode all of the scraped snaps to the "normal" or "High Profile" preset and turning down quality to 25 to make the files a little smaller (on par with the original sizes). It is also helpful before doing this to set Handbrake on the output tab to always use .MP4 extensions or you will have to rename everything from .M4V to match the names the gameslist.xml file expects to find.

hiulit

In case anyone in this thread is interested, I just released v2.1.0 of RetroPie Convert Videos.