Scraping and Merging Metadata (Player Number) for gamelist.xml

robertvb83

this will be a longer posting, i cant be the only one having this issue!!! I am just not getting done with good quality Metadata by scraping.

Mainly i used the universal XML scraper to get all my videosnaps and screenshots and Metadata. It works very well for me and i was very happy with the resulting gamelist.xml file. Now i have all the videos and cool arranged images which is really cool.

But there is a major issue with the database: Incorrect Metadata especially for number of Players! No method of scraping gives me correct results regarding the player number. It is almost random...

For now i am only interested in MAME / FBA Metadata. I have for example simpsons and tmnt in my collection. for each both the 2P and the 4P version. Metadata is exactly the same for both roms. This is very annoying because i am not able to filter for Player number in case i like to show only 4P games. I guess the database is somehow even for MAME only game specific but not rom specific.

So my next step was to create a whole new gamelist.xml with Sselph Scraper (really cool and fast tool), but without image and video. I than ran this really cool script (changed for my needs) to add the respective video and image entry for the gamelist.xml.

Everything went very well and additionally i think Sselph is giving better Game name entries (better to differentiate between similar versions). But then again quite a mess with the number of players entry. Now i have many false 4P entries. It just isn't right.

I just figured out that there are already very good quality Metadata mamelist.xml files like here for the mame2003-plus.xml. It seems to be a complete list filled with Metadata and also number of players for each specific ROM. So each version of a game is filled with the individual respective entry for Player number.

And here comes my final question: Does anybody of you geniuses (no sarcasm here) know of a solution to merge the player number entry of that mame2003-plus.xml into my gamelist.xml file for each rom entry? I am near to the point of promising a reward for presenting a solution :-)

off topic: i always have the feeling that i am the first person to run into a specific problem and i often mess around for days or even weeks to figure things out. Most of the i notice that i did a thing all wrong and thus also research in the false direction, when figuring out what to search for, most of the time the solution is presented extremely clever here in this forum. leading me to a way of doing things a completely different and much better way. I think this community is especially dedicated and responsive, with so much valuable contributions. I am just blown away some times.