Skyscraper question...

jthomas5150

Pi Model: Zero
Power Supply used: Retroflag GPi
RetroPie Version Used: 4.5.1
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie
Controller used: Regroflag GPi

Hi, is there a way to configure Skyscraper to append instead of overwrite when it creates the gamelist.xml file? I know the Self Scraper has this option....

mitu

Skyscraper works a bit different than Stephen Selph's Scraper.
It caches all the artwork/info gathered and then re-generates the gamelists based on that cache. As long as your cache is intact, the gamelist generated would always contain the artwork for all - successfully - scraped games.

Is there anything in particular that you want to do and it's not behaving as you'd like ? Maybe there's another way to do it with Skyscraper.

jthomas5150

Hi, by append, I make some changes to the gamelist.xml file due to the scraper pulling bad names. When I make changes, and re-scrape down the road, it overwrites my changes. Self's scraper has an option to change this behavior.

mitu

The way to do this with SkyScraper is to add the missing/new information to the cache, so when it generates the gamelist files, those info will be added each time (correctly).
You can use the --edit command line option to edit the cache resources or maybe use the esgamelist import module, where Skyscraper can import your existing gamelist.xml information.
I have to admit I haven't use any of those features before - they're documented on the Skyscraper site: https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper/tree/master/docs.

EDIT: or an easier way is to rename the files and use the option to generate the title based on the file name, overriding anything the scraper gets from the online sources. Skyscraper uses the file's contents to search, so renaming the file will be ok.

nightbirdmedia

@mitu Speaking of scraping, why is Final Burn Alpha the only emulator that seem to have trouble being scraped? I can move them from one SD card to another and the images do not carry over. Then when I go to scrape them using Skyscraper it won't scrape them. Or acts like only a few games need scraped. I think I should just try using one of the other scrapers like Stephen Selph's Scraper. I wish they had a quicker way to access them.

mitu

@nightbirdmedia without more details, who can say ? FBA is no more included in RetroPie, FBNeo has replaced it. FBNeo is a multi-system emulator, so when you say 'FBA', I don't know if you're scraping the fba system, or the neogeo/megadrive/arcade systems, all of which are configured to use FBNeo as emulator.
Open a new topic and give more details about your issue(s) - including the pertaining info asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

jthomas5150

@mitu Excellent! Thanks for the help! I will try this in the next few days. And thanks for your help in this community!