Skyscraper Data Location Question

Agrajag

My ROM collection is in a rather anal file hierarchy on SMB shares that often includes sub folders to keep roms separate by system type, system, country, etc. So a specific NES rom might be under:
/Consoles/NES/World/ or /Consoles/NES/USA/, etc.

This seemed to work fine. I pointed Retropie to the root folder just above the branches and it works.

However, I just ran Skyscraper for the first time and instead of finding systems like Scraper did it found the root folders -- in this case, "Arcade", "Consoles", "Handheld", etc. I decided to let it rip on "Consoles" and it took about an hour (I only have NES and Atari 2600 in there for now) to do the first step and then another hour to build the list, but when it finished there was no data attached to any of the games in Retropie's interface.

Will this file structure not work for SkyScraper and do I now have a bunch of data on my microSD card that's neutered and just wasting space? If so, where would I look to find it and delete it?

This is on a RP4 Canakit 8GB setup with 32GB microSD card.

mitu

Skyscraper keeps a cache with the downloaded artwork/info, used in a 2nd step to generate the files needed by EmulationStation other front-end. Did you run the 2nd step ?
You can view the cache using the --cache parameter:

/opt/retropie/supplementary/skyscraper/Skyscraper --cache show -p nes

would show you the cached data for the nes system.

muldjord

@agrajag The Skyscraper cache is located at /home/pi/.skyscraper/cache/PLATFORM.

Skyscraper was designed to work with the RetroPie folder scheme. So snes files should be located under /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes. In that folder you can have subfolders, that will work just fine, as long as all files are for the snes platform.

If you want to change the main snes input folder, you need to configure Skyscraper to know where that is. You can do this either per-platform or on a general basis.

You can edit /home/pi/.skyscraper/config.ini and add:

[main]
inputFolder="/your/general/roms/folder"

That will make Skyscraper look for all platforms inside that folder. But the base folders inside it need to still be snes, megadrive and so on.

You can also configure it on a per-platform basis. With snes as example, you can edit /home/pi/.skyscraper/config.ini and add:

[snes]
inputFolder="/base/folder/for/snes"

Agrajag

@muldjord Thanks. BTW, it ended up working. I turned on the system (I keep the Retropie running) and an OK button was waiting for me and I find all the NES games and Atari games all have info and box art.

Not sure what I'll do next time as I couldn't drill down to systems in the SkyScraper UI I had. "Console" was as close as it would get to each actual system in my hierarchy, but then again, maybe that will just work too.

muldjord

@agrajag Yes, I believe the script doesn't traverse subfolders (which makes sense, otherwise it'd be a mess). You should instead consider using Skyscraper from command-line. Then you have a lot better control. It's all very well documented here. Don't follow the installation procedure of course, since you already have it installed through the script.

Agrajag

@muldjord Lars, I could use your input on my setup and its impact on Skyscraper.

For example, I noticed I don't have any Marquees and in my latest scrape (running now) I noticed as it's running it includes the following line:

Marquees folder: '/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/Consoles/marquees/'

The point is that I have no such folder showing as noted above. I have no 'downloaded_media' folder at all. I do have downloaded_images which contains. 'arcade', 'atari2600' and 'nes' (as expected as those are the three systems I started with).

I'm thinking that the SMB link may be creating way too much confusion and may force me to copy roms from this archive on our server over to the retropie microSD card for simplicity sake.

I tried using inputFolder for both [nes] and [atari2600], but neither seemed to do much. After adding them to config.ini and re-running SkyScraper I still only saw the option to select Platforms (during the Gather stage) from: 'Arcade', 'Consoles', 'Handheld' and 'Retro PC' which is my top-level in the archive. I had thought inputFolder would allow me to see 'nes' and 'atari2600' as selections here. The 'Consoles' entry for the Marquee line happened because I select 'Consoles' for this run.

(I'm still digesting the full docs to move to command line usage)

mitu

I tried using inputFolder for both [nes] and [atari2600], but neither seemed to do much

The scraping dialog that you start from RetroPie-Setup doesn't read your .ini file to look for folders, but expects the standard RetroPie folder structure.

If you changed the folder in the .ini file, run the scraper manually:

/opt/retropie/supplementary/skyscraper/Skyscraper -p nes -s screenscraper ... other flags ...

EDIT: just to make it easier, you can probably symlink the folders from your SMB mounted drive to the actual RetroPie folders, i.e.

/mount/network/Arcade -> $HOME/RetroPie/roms/arcade
/mount/Consoles/Atari Xyx -> $HOME/RetroPie/roms/atari5200
/mount/Consoles/Nintendo Entertainment System  -> $HOME/RetroPie/roms/nes
etc.