PS1 and Arcade Romlists / Scraping

[Funkleton]

Hi - these are probably the usual noob questions you folks deal with every day here so please forgive my ignorance in advance.

I'm planning on building a mini arcade cab out of the guts of an old laptop with a broken screen, and while I'm finishing up the other project that's taking up all the space in the garage, I thought I'd have a tinker with AM so I have at least a vague idea of what I'm doing when the time comes.

Following a couple of tutorials -  and with the exception of AM/GDB doggedly refusing to acknowledge the existence of multiple spellings and iterations of  "Landstalker The Treasures of King Nole" despite having an entry for it - I found creating romlists, scraping artwork, setting a nice theme to be pretty straightforward for my NES, SNES, N64, and Megadrive roms.

So far so simple.


Not so much with my arcade and PS1 roms though.

After a few false starts with my Arcade roms I set the info source / scraper to listxml and pointed the rompath to my rom folder in Mame - this seemed to work fine up and generated what looked like a valid entry for each rom in the mame romlist.
So I moved on to scraping the artwork, trying various / all combinations of all of the scraping source options
Out of around 1200 roms, thegamesdb.net doesn't recognise around 300 and doesn't scrape artwork for them.

First I checked the romlist txt file and all of the roms that GDB doesn't recognise they do appear to have a valid entry on the mame romlist - and all of the ones I've checked so far (about 20) also have a valid entry on GDB which contains at least some of the relevant artwork. So I just don't understand why it can't scrape them.

This isn't a major issue - my final build isn't going to contain anything close to 1200 roms as that seems a little too unwieldy for even the best front end to cope with and a lot of the roms I have are just curios / crap - however I to would like to understand what's going wrong in case I decide to include any of the "unrecognisable" roms in the final build.

Does anyone know off the top of their head what's going on here?
if not what info do you need from me to investigate it further?
Worst case scenario I can presumably hack this manually by finding my own artwork, giving it a filename which corresponds with the rom, and dropping it into the relevant folders for AM to pick up right?

Next up Playstation 1 roms

This is turning out to be a bit of a head scratcher.
I've got a folder with around 100 subfolders which contain the .bin and .cue files of each rom - so I figured it would be simpler to remove those files from their subfolders rather than create 100 different file paths for the rompath(s) in AM - so I tried this with about 5 romsets as an experiment to see what would happen.

Not much happens.

Starting off with the obvious settings for the filepath to the emulator (emuhawk), default setting for command arguments (not sure what this does yet) - working directory blank - rom path to the location of the rom folder  - rom extensions as .bin; .cue - System Identifier as Sony Playstation - Info Source / Scraper as thegamesdb.net - and the rest of the fields as blank / default.

I get this:

*** Generating Collection/Rom List: Playstation One
 - Found 13 files.
 - scraping thegamesdb.net...
 - Platform :Sony Playstation (10)
 - 5 games not matched on thegamesdb.net: "Alundra (USA)","Ape Escape (USA)","Azure Dreams (USA)","Blood Omen - Legacy of Kain (USA)","Brave Fencer Musashi (USA)"
 - thegamesdb.net reports a remaining allowance of: Unknown
 - Removing any duplicate entries...
 + Writing 9 entries to: D:\Retrogames\Emulators\Attract\romlists/Playstation One.txt
Writing emulator config to: D:\Retrogames\Emulators\Attract\emulators/Playstation One.cfg

when I check the romlist all I can see is the title and a bunch of semi-colons denoting blank data fields.

To cut a long story short whatever I have tried with the previous emulators - like tweaking the filenames, changing the info source / scraper to the other options, aternating between .bin, .cue and both file extensions - I either get the same result, or AM attempts to open the emulator and then immediately freezes.

A little help?

****Edit******

Just in case it wasn't clear - and to save anyone wasting their time checking - the PS1 games I've tried to scrape so far do all have valid entries on GBD

[akafox]

Well welcome to our world! xD

That is just part of it. The gamesdb is not perfect. Nor will it ever will be sadly...You will always find games that are in the database but will not scrape. That being said you can:

1. Took at the gbd and rename your rom/.cute to match exactly like it is listed on the database.
2. Manually download and find all the things you need/want.

and number two on that list is normally what happens.

As for your PSX cue/bins is there a reason you need/want to use bizhawk as opposed to other psx emulators? (do you do a lot of speed running?)

if so we can get you set up...if not well we can try another emulator and fix you up there as well.

I have to ask about your file tree...so you have your games in separate folders to house all the bin files each comes with or al the all dumped in in folder and you look for just the cue files? (as of this moment.)

You can combine all of your bins into one bin/cue file per game (thus two files per game). Or you can use an emulator that supports chd format (thus a single file per game).

I have to point out sometimes the GDB will just stop allowing you to scrape if you try to do to many at once. I had that problem. I had to wait until the next day to finish..or it could have just been a network problem...)

either way let us know and we can help you.

[hermine.potter]

1) Artwork scrape
-try to split romfiles (letter A, letter B, .. , letter Z) > generate romlist per letter (like here)
-as told as by akafox : try later again
-try another scraper tool (like Universal XML Scraper > copy the artwork to AM-folder

2) Games in subfolders (Sega Saturn as an example):
-you can try to move all files to one Single Folder/Main-Romfolder and configure AM:

executable           C:\attract\EMU\Sega Saturn\EmuHawk.exe
args                 "[romfilename]" --fullscreen
rompath              C:\attract\EMU\Sega Saturn\ROMS
romext               .cue
system               Sega Saturn
info_source          thegamesdb.net
exit_hotkey          Escape

or

-one folder, each game (subfolder):

try to get the same folder-names like the name of .cue-file:
ROMS/myGame123/myGame123.cue
ROMS/myGame123/myGame123 (Track1).bin

executable           C:\attract\EMU\Sega Saturn\EmuHawk.exe
args                 "[romfilename]\[name].cue" --fullscreen
rompath              C:\attract\EMU\Sega Saturn\ROMS
romext               <DIR>
system               Sega Saturn
info_source          thegamesdb.net
exit_hotkey          Escape