Welcome back! This post discusses picks up from where “insert article link here” left off. Now that you have the roms loaded and playing games in RetroPie, you notice that the games have no description, images, etc. If you would like to show pretty images and description, this article is for you.
There are several ways of accomplish that, but the best way I found is using the optional utility called Skyscraper, while the internal screen scraper works OK, it is not optimal and customizable…
Setting up Skyscraper is composed of different steps. We’ll go through one by one. First install Skyscraper.
Install Skyscraper TBD
RetroPie has documentation about the different supported way of Scraping, you can find it here, and the official product documentation is here, however, I found the documentation not complete; I will augment their docs in regards to Skyscraper.
Once you are done with the installation, time to proceed with running it.
Run Skyscraper
The official way to execute skyscraper is from the retropie_config.sh menu as described here, however, I if you are familiar with Linux, there is a more convenient way to execute the program. I developed a script that can be executed independently, this will give you more control. The gist can be found here. I normally wrap the script execution in a tmux session, this assure that network interruption do not effect the correct execution of the script. If you need help with tmux, I’ve created an article that explains it.
To run skyscraper, simply download the gist and execute it. The scripts assume RetrtoPie is installed in the default place. If you customized the installation, the script might not work.
The script will automatically pick up all the platforms that have roms installed and will ask you to first import the rom metadata, then it will ask you to generate the gamelist.
The process takes a while depending how many roms you have, also there are limits that screenscraper.fr sets per user. So mileage may vary depends on usage.
Adding Custom Games
Not all games will be found while screenscraping, should you have a game that remains empty after the scan, you can populate the information manually. At the time of this document, the process to add custom roms is not well documented. I will outline the basic steps here.
First create the file ~/.skyscraper/import/definitions.dat with the following content:
<game>
<title>###TITLE###</title>
<description>###DESCRIPTION###</description>
<developer>###DEVELOPER###</developer>
<publisher>###PUBLISHER###</publisher>
<players>###PLAYERS###</players>
<rating>###RATING###</rating>
<ages>###AGES###</ages>
<genre>###TAGS###</genre>
<releasedate>###RELEASEDATE###</releasedate>
</game>
Now, in the following directory: ~/.skyscraper/import/{PLATFORM} where platform is the platform name, for example snes, create at the very least, three directories: covers, screenshots, and textual. The files in each directory must follow the exact rom name, if the rom name is thegame.zip, the cover must be called, thegame.jpeg, and screenshot thegame.png, and the textual, thegame.xml. Covers and Screenshots are self-explanatory, for the textual part, you would create a file with the same name as the rom file and put the following content:
<game>
<title>The Title of the Game</title>
<description>The description of the game.
</description>
<developer>The developer</developer>
<publisher>The publisher</publisher>
<players>1</players>
<rating>The rating 1,2,3,4.5,5 etc</rating>
<ages>The minimum age to play the game, 10</ages>
<genre>The Genre, Adventure, Puzzle, etc</genre>
<releasedate>The release date</releasedate>
</game>
Once the information is populated, you simply re-execute skyscraper for the appropriate platform and the game metadata will be imported in emulation station.
I hope I did not forget anything, but if I did, please leave me a comment and let me know.
Happy playing!