Reply To: MAME confusion, why multiple versions?

[retrofredde]

toasti, I use the program posted here:
http://lakeuk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/raspberry-pi-retropie.html
…in combination with ES-scraper.

First I run scraper and then loads gamelist.xml and downloaded cover art to a new folder on the computer and run the .exe file from that program inside the same folder, it’ll then show the current state of the gamelist file with cover art and descriptipn if available. Then you can go through the list and cut and paste new art and description from a web database and google and click update and it’ll save the new info to the gamelist.xml file. When you’re done you just delete the old gamelist.xml on your pi and uploads the new gamelist.xml file in it’s place. Done. :)

It still take some time to do it but I find it easier than doing it completely manually.

A trick to get scraper to find more games is to temporarily rename the games and try scraping again. Especially neogeo is impossible to scrape without renaming the games.

Like this…
mv androdun.zip “Andro Dunos.zip”

Scrape with -p flag and choose neogeo will do the trick.

But it needs the old filenames to run, so…
mv “Andro Dunos.zip” androdun.zip

And finally go into the gamelist.xml and find the path and swap Andro Dunos.zip to androdun.zip

I wouldn’t do this on a huge collection though. And if you spend the time to do it this way… Do backups on your retropie image often! I did daily backups when I did my gamelists, luckily so because I’ve had two incidents with corrupt SD card. It’s final now though, cover art and description on every game. :)