Newish user, have some questions

mitu

I'm posting here since there seems to be no emulationstation forum...

That's normal, since the main version is not maintained anymore.

I've never had to do this, it's just that ES's internal scrapers don't work anymore since servers are gone.

They're not gone, they just changed their site and the scraping API, so the internal ES scraper is not working anymore. This is fixed in the RetroPie's Emulationstation fork.

Kracov

i installed the new emulationstation but apparently i can't use the keyboard, mouse and controller. i assume i have to reconfigure them? How?

mitu

@Kracov The keyboard should work right of the box, the controller can be configured from the menu, in the Input configuration dialog.

Kracov

the only key that worked was f4. the arrow keys would not scroll down to selec the input config. i did get a COM error message after exiting. i guess i need to reinstall an older version or something.

Clyde

@Kracov Welcome to the forum.

A word of advice, it's more helpful for helpers if you tell them the exact error message instead of just saying that there was one.

If your system was working before, why did you install a new version of ES? Just curious.

Kracov

It only happened once so I didn't get a chance to read it all. COM Surrogate, I think. I didn't technically "install" it as it just contained files and folders and I extracted them from the zip and moved/replaced them in the ES folder. I wanted a new version because I wanted to be able to use the scraper, but I will just try the Selph's scraper etc.

Clyde

@Kracov If it only happened once, but your keyboard doesn't work the whole time, it may have nothing to do with it anyway.

I can recommend Selph's Scraper. I tried some others and returned to it nonetheless.

I can also recommend making a backup before changing things like upgrading the installed software. It makes undoing them much more easy.

Kracov

i could find no windows documentation on selphs scraper. just linux i think.

mitu

@Kracov It's the same documentation as for Linux, it's a command line scraper. There are Windows builds on the Releases page on the Github project that you can use.

Kracov

selph's scraper runs and searches for games but it does not fix the emulationstation games list/images. i even tried to manually edit ES's default gamelist but the metadata and images do not show up i even double checked the paths and everything.

Clyde

@Kracov You could delete or rename the gamelist.xml (e.g. to gamelist.xml.backup) and let the scraper create a completely new one, in case that there's something wrong with the existing one. Selph's Scraper will not scrape existing images and videos anew, so it shouldn't take as much time to scrape only the metadata for a new gamelist.

Kracov

I just tried what you suggested, but selphs scraper still did not fix the missing game images including metadata. Mortal Kombat 3, X-Men, Doom, other popular titles. I assume you are talking about the gamelist in the main ES folder, not the subsequent ones in each system?

Clyde

It depends if you enable the option ROM folder for gamelists & images in Selph's Scraper. I do have enabled it, so my gamelists are located in the rom folders, not in /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists. See https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/#where-are-my-scraped-media-and-metadata-saved about the possible locations.