Scraper will not find any game information at all, will not create a gamelist.xml either

RVA-818X-LAYstar

I recently got a larger micro SD card and did a image with Win32DiskImager. I expanded the larger SD with Expand Filesystem. All seemed well.

I then re-organised my roms folders and added some new systems following the instructions in the Docs. Everything was working great but I had one or two systems that just wouldn't scrape at all. Basically, nothing would be scraped, the scraper wouldn't find any info - text or pictures, and it would end with "0 games scraped" for that system (for example the SuperGrafx).

I've searched and looked into things, so here's what I've done so far:

Updated all retropie installs
reinstalled emulationstation
tried both sources for scraper
tried different systems for scraper
checked my systems.cfg file - no errors
deleted everything in opt/retropie/config/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/
deleted everything in opt/retropie/config/all/emulationstation/gamelists
deleted everything in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/scrapers
quit emulationstation, from terminal ran retropie_setup.sh, reinstalled all main binaries including emulationstation
emulationstation updated and reinstalled from source - is version V2.9.6RP

Nothing seems to work

I checked opt/retropie/config/all/emulationstation/es_log.txt

and the only thing of note was this:

Feb 08 17:22:16 lvl1: 	TheGamesDBJSONRequest - Response had no game data.

Feb 08 17:22:39 lvl2: 	Added/Updated 3 entities in '/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/psx/gamelist.xml'
Feb 08 17:22:39 lvl2: 	Saved gamelist.xml for system "psx" in 0 ms
Feb 08 17:22:39 lvl2: 	EmulationStation cleanly shutting down.

I tried a different system, this time the 3DO, and I got this in the opt/retropie/config/all/emulationstation/es_log.txt:

Feb 08 17:52:05 lvl1: 	TheGamesDBJSONRequest - Response had no game data.

Feb 08 17:52:38 lvl0: 	ScreenScraperRequest - Error parsing XML.
Start-end tags mismatch

I have checked every xml file I can find and either deleted it or checked it against https://www.xmlvalidation.com and then manually checked it in notepad++

I'm at a bit of a loss and don't know what else to try?

mitu

If you scraped recently from TGDB a large number of titles, you've probably reach your quota (5000 scrapes per month ?). The error in the log means the scraping source hasn't returned anything usable for the scraper.

nexusone13

@rva-818x-laystar About Screenscraper, here is a message from the admins dated 07/02/2021 :

'We have been experiencing a technical problem on the main ScreenScraper server for several hours now. Apparently, after diagnosis, it has a physical problem with its storage units.
You have opened a ticket afterwards from our hosting provider OVH. We are now waiting for a reaction from them.
The site and the API are therefore not available until further information.
Thank you for your patience, the ScreenScraper team'

mitu

@nexusone13 Thank you for the heads up.

RVA-818X-LAYstar

@mitu

once again you guys are on the money

I was really thrown by the error:

Feb 08 17:52:38 lvl0: 	ScreenScraperRequest - Error parsing XML.
Start-end tags mismatch

But I just connected to my phone as a wifi hotspot with a new IP, and sure enough, the scraper function works

Crush

While you see this maintenance msg, nothing from screenscraper will work, for the reasons Nexusone13 mentioned. https://screenscraper.fr/
But i think it will be quite a while before its working again.

Crush

It should all work again!

Hi everyone!

Sorry about the service interruption, there were issues with the replication system making one of our server unusable.

We've taken steps to avoid this issue to happen again, and I hope to make a post mortem in the following days.

We sincerly apologize for the inconveniance,

The ScreenScraper team

RVA-818X-LAYstar

@crush
ah you guys are legends - thank you!