Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots

gomisensei

@meleu said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

I think I solved all the issues. Let's remember:

Seems to work, just did a few quick test as i am about to sleep.

Successfully adds image to entry with no image.

Replaces existing image if a new one is found.

Will test gamelist creation tmrw.

Thanks for the work, appreciate it, this is a great tool for us folks who want our own screenshots without using a text editor.

meleu

@gomisensei
Your feedback was really important to these last fixes.

I enjoyed to code it. Improved my sed skills. :-)

I'm just having troubles to take screenshots of the arcade games main screen, because the hotkey is select and it also insert coins (easy to workaround remapping this function to another button). :-) Apart from that, everything seems to be fine.

gomisensei

@meleu said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

@gomisensei
Your feedback was really important to these last fixes.

I enjoyed to code it. Improved my sed skills. :-)

YW

I'm just having troubles to take screenshots of the arcade games main screen, because the hotkey is select and it also insert coins (easy to workaround remapping this function to another button). :-) Apart from that, everything seems to be fine.

I just hit menu key, then quick menu -> take screenshot for each one.

meleu

Just sharing an info...
I have just noticed that when scraping screenshots with those methods, the runcommand launch menu art doesn't work.

I think it happens because runcommand searches for filenames ending with -image.{jpg,png}, as we can see here:

        for path in "${image_paths[@]}"; do
            if [[ -f "$path/${rom_bn}-image.jpg" ]]; then
                image="$path/${rom_bn}-image.jpg"
                break
            elif [[ -f "$path/${rom_bn}-image.png" ]]; then
                image="$path/${rom_bn}-image.png"
                break
            fi
        done

herb_fargus

@meleu simple enough to either add an on start function to look for non -images or a different function to batch append -image to all jpg and png files.

meleu

@herb_fargus
The renaming process needs to occurs before the gamelist.xml manipulation in both methods. If it occurs after, the ES will look for the filename in the <image> field and won't find the file.

It would be simple in method 2, because it already uses a runcommand-onend.sh script. But method 1 would need a runcommand-onend.sh just for this task.

For now I will just add a warning in the wiki talking about this issue...

Chameleon

@meleu

I followed the wiki but found out that Retroarch was overwriting the changes your runcommand-onend.sh script was making.

Turns out, "Save Meta Data On Exit" was enabled by default under "Main Menu>Other Settings". Once I disabled this everything worked beautifully.

I think it would be helpful if the wiki is updated to reflect/mention checking this.

Thanks for the great work on the script!

PS: I'm on RetroPie 4.0.

edit: words

meleu

@Chameleon The "save metadata on exit" has nothing to do with RetroArch. It's an emulationstation feature. Anyway, I can't reproduce your issue here.

I turned on the "save metadata on exit", played some games that has screenshots as emulationstation image, exited emulationstation (to get metadata updated), came back to emulationstation and the screenshots still there.

Can you describe what exactly happened to you?

Chameleon

@meleu

I was trying to capture screenshots for arcade roms that didn't have an existing image (ie: no existing <image> tags in the gamelist.xml).

After capturing an in game screenshot, a file would be saved to my custom screenshot directory with the rom as the name of the file (as expected).

The emu/system level gamelist.xml showed that your script added the <image> tag details (as expected).

Once I restarted emulationstation (via the menu), I noticed the emu/system level gamelist.xml has been overwritten with the original contents (ie: <Image> tag details are removed).

Further testing concluded that what ever was in memory was most likely being written back into the gamelist.xml file upon emulationstation restart; hence the <image> tag removal.

I then turned off "Save MetaData On Exit" and the gamelist.xml file was no longer being overwritten upon emulationstation restart.

Side note: trying to capture screenshots with lr-mame2003 produces no images in my custom folder, but it works fine for fba-next and lr-mame4all.

meleu

@Chameleon Oh! I reproduced here. I took a screenshot for a game that didn't have an screenshot as emulationstation image, the script updated the gamelist.xml, and when I exited emulationstation the updated entry was gone.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll update the wiki.
[edit: wiki page updated]

Chameleon

>Side note: trying to capture screenshots with lr-mame2003 produces no images in my custom folder, but it works fine for fba-next and lr-mame4all.

Further investigation reveals that lr-mame2003 is saving screenshots to:

/home/pi/.config/retroarch/screenshots

With filenames like: RetroArch-0530-043358.png

I assume that is the typical default filename with datetime stamp as suffix. Viewing the png files reveals direct matches to the screenshots I took in game.

Is there a way to inform lr-mame2003 to use the my custom screenshot_directory as defined in the retroarch.cfg file?

Not sure why lr-mame2003 isnt following the convention.

Edit: my retropie datetime stamp is currently set to May 30 just in case the above filename causes confusion lol.

Edit: spelling

meleu

@Chameleon it seems that it is ignoring auto_screenshot_filename AND screenshot_directory. Can you check if its respective retroarch.cfg #includes the global one?

Chameleon

@meleu said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

@Chameleon it seems that it is ignoring auto_screenshot_filename AND screenshot_directory. Can you check if its respective retroarch.cfg #includes the global one?

You are totally correct. I overwrote my mame-libretro \ retroarch.cfg awhile back and hence the #include "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg" line was missing as the last line of the file - my bad.

Putting the #include line back in fixed it for me.

Thanks a lot!

CoolCat

what would be the easiest way of have screenshots instead of art?
i like the idea of take our own screenshot, but sometimes scrapper is handy.
best wishes,

meleu

@CoolCat said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

what would be the easiest way of have screenshots instead of art?

My opinion:

Use the runcommand-onstart.sh from method 1 (this will set the needed configs in retroarch.cfg files).
Use the runcommand-onend.sh from method 2 (this will fill the gamelist.xml with the path to the screenshot files).
Turn off "save metadata on exit" in emulationstation.
Take screenshots of your games.

i like the idea of take our own screenshot, but sometimes scrapper is handy.

Uh... I think it was a little contradictory... :-)
If you scrape your roms first of all, and then do what I described above, you'll get what I think you want.

CoolCat

Yes. You are right :)
My issue is that i dont know how to scrape screenshot :/
Best regards,

CoolCat

I know how to take a screenshot with retroarch, but that seems to not work.
Would be cool if retropie could try the other folder for screenshots and use it properlly anyway.
Regards,

meleu

@CoolCat did you read the first post of this thread? There is a link to the wiki showing how to do it.

CoolCat

@meleu Yes, i found it latter :)
Anyhow, i have to look over so many things.
ES has a thumbnail metadata that dont use.
I think hyperspin does have even videos.
Retropie is full new playground.
Wonder if someone is thinking of a lr-jzintv for example.
So im reading and testing atm, but i still need more time testing so i can say something better based.
Probabbly the better would be use the thumbnail metadata (and probabbly have a theme that support it)
For completeness a videoshot support, maybe.
But first i need to understand why it wasnt made before.
Btw, i loved this forum script :) (it just miss the reply by mail. )

meleu

@CoolCat said in Take and Scrape Your Own Screenshots:

@meleu Yes, i found it latter :)
Anyhow, i have to look over so many things.

I'll use the default argue to this :-)
"Raspberry Pi is, first of all, a tool for learning."

Although RetroPie is not limited to raspi, it's the plataform where we love to run it. :-)

I think hyperspin does have even videos.

Maybe you like to see what @Floob is doing with attract mode front-end.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/93/attract-mode-with-retropie-alternative-to-emulationstation

Personally, I love the simplicity of emulationstation and enjoy to run it on my raspi1.