Messages

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General / Re: Scraping a video game collection with the changes to thegamesdb.net

« on: February 04, 2019, 01:21:43 AM »

If you only care about MAME you can get artwork here for free http://www.progettosnaps.net/index.php

https://emumovies.com/ will give you some amount of data for free each day or you can pay for a per month/year/lifetime. They have a sync tool that will match the artwork names to your rom names, which is important.

I'll mention that you don't tell us anything about your setup. Low powered systems like a Pi might not do well with high quality videos from emumovies.com, but they have others. Test and/or consider this before you spend any money.

Whoops, quoted your message but forgot to reply.

It's a simple laptop. A rather cheap one but more than enough powerful to power the games that I set up on it. I do not use MAME or anything like that. I manually set up each individual emulator (nestopia, snes9x, gzdoom, still choosing other emulators). The laptop runs a Linux-based operating system called Void. The system is built using the Musl C library. That means that any non-free Linux binaries won't work (unless they were linked against Musl-libc, which is very highly unlikely, this means that any solution that is paid for, i.e the tool that you've mentioned, probably is a no go on my computer). I'm just looking for a simple solution. I want to be able to automatically download art and metadata for my games so that I can get the design part of the set up process over with and move on to configuring more emulators. I've had a Raspberry Pi with Recalbox on it a while ago, and I was able to very easily automatically scrape my entire library. In about 30 minutes it will have finished scraping a few hundred thousands of roms, including names, ratings and other metadata and, of course, artwork. Can I maybe change the video game database site to one other than thegamesdb.net?

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General / Scraping a video game collection with the changes to thegamesdb.net

« on: February 03, 2019, 11:09:09 PM »

Hello. First of all, I'm a complete beginner to all of this, so please do forgive me for any mistake I make.
I want to prepare a simple to use arcade setup for my sister. So far setting it up has been a rather straight forward experience, but I'm having incredible difficulties designing the software.
I want my setup to have pictures and graphics, as my sister does not read English.
Trying to scrape my library results in error $1, as someone else has reported here in the forum.
I understand this is due to changes in the thegamesdb.net server, and it will be fixed, but I'd like to scrape my entire library right now. How else can I scrape my library? Can I use another website? Also, I've followed a manual scraping guide posted on this forum as well, but all I could download were large 7z files full of uncategorised images. Is there a more straight forward guide to manually scraping your library? My library is quite massive, so manually editing each game's metadata would be very time consuming.