Reply To: Scraper: little details to solve…

[sselph]

The current version of emulationstation looks for the gamelist.xml file first in the rom folder and if it doesn’t exist it looks in the ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/(system) folder and finally /etc/emulationstation/gamelists/(system). The images can be anywhere since the gamelist tells ES where to look.

I prefer the gamelist and images in the rom folder since it makes it easier to copy files to and from the retropie. I actually wrote the scraper to run on my desktop and then I copied the files over to make upgrading systems easier.

ES’s author, Aloshi, has the opposite opinion and prefers that the gamelist and images not clutter up the rom folder so the internal scraper places things in the ~/.emulationstation folder.

My script can be invoked with command line flags to tell it where to find the roms and where you will be placing the gamelist and images. This is how it works when my script is invoked from the retropie-setup script. But keep in mind the gamelist can only be in one of three places if you expect ES to find it.

Something like this(with (system) replaced by the system) but you need to double check the paths since I’m doing this from memory. The image path is specified twice since this script was originally designed to be run from a different system, this allowed the host and target system to have a different folder location.

scraper -output_file ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/(system)/gamelist.xml -img_dir ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/(system) -img_path ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/(system) -rom_dir ~/retropie/roms/(system)