Scraping covers with higher resolution or use my own.

[gentlemanfinn]

I have been working on removing everything but the cover image when browsing games.

I have done this and am starting to like the look of my work, but i have notised that some og the covers are crooket, low resolution or different sizes..

It would be nice to be able to uniform the experince. Is this posible? It dosent matter that i have to do it manually because i only have ~40 games spread out over the diffent emulators i am using and dont plan to get any more any time soon.

Hope that some one can help me do this!

Likewise i would love the differen emulators to play a theme melody that is iconic for that emulator when browsing.

An exapble would be to have the Mario world melody play in the background when browsing snes games. Ultimately every game would have their own melody when highlighted on the list, but that would probably be too much work.

[herbfargus]

The game covers come from thegamesdb.net which like retropie is created by the community, add on various sources/versions of games and you get more fragmentation and game covers with low resolution etc. You can download jpegs of covers you think look better and crop them to a certain dimension through gimp or something like that and then manually scrape each game to scrape your own images rather than the online game databases.
I know sselph also has a command line scraper that only does images but I think you’d have the same issues with image resolution and whatnot.

As far as the music choice yes I think that would be a lot of work.

[gentlemanfinn]

I would love to scarpe my own images.. I dont understand how I do it tho.

By the way I am probably not going to use covers, but .PNG files of ingame stuff.

Would it be posible to guide me through the process?

Edit: I used my brain and searched the forum. I think I can do what i want now thanks!

Now to solve the music dilemma :9

[herbfargus]

Sure thing. So first you create a central folder for all of your images (in can be anywhere) by default the downloaded images from the scraper reside in /home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/

But in your case it would probably be easiest to just keep the pictures in the same folder as your ROMS for each system (so just in case you need to back things up they are all in the same place) so for a new nes game your images would be in
/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/nes/
Or to keep it simpler you can keep them all in one folder- its up to you.

There are two ways you can add the images to emulation station

Method 1:

You can either add them directly to the gamelist.XML for each system in
/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/

You’d change the existing image file path in the line <image> to your new image file path

Method 2:

After you’ve copied your images to your raspberry pi somewhere, while in emulation station with a keyboard you can go into a system like the nes and then for each game instead of opening it you will press select and there will be an option to choose edit this games metadata.
Select that and go down to image and then enter the new file path to your new image.

Then important part- to save changes you’ll need to choose the option from the menu “quit emulationstation” rather than restart system and that will write your changes. Reboot and they should all be there and you’ll be good to go

[gentlemanfinn]

You was quicker than my edit! Thanks. That is much better then what i had in mind. I like how you can personalize the experince on the pi!

By the way when i searched the forum I found a video that said the pi cant handle too large picrures.. I have a pi 2 – is it better suited to handle the larger pictures?

Edit: I am the king og edits btw :)

How do i get rid og the old scraping files? Is it just to delete some files or do the manual scraping take control?

[herbfargus]

The gamelist.XML files are where all of your game data is kept so you can just delete everything you don’t want in each of those files or you can also do that manually by editing the games metadata as mentioned above. Generally speaking the images really are just thumbnails so its probably not that beneficial to have images that at multiple megabytes a piece. Id you want to start with higher quality pics you can take those and run them through an image optimiser online so it keeps a decent quality but doesn’t bog down emulation station. If you get too much going on in emulation station it can cause issues and you have to reallocate ram and stuff but if you optimise your images you should be fine.

[gentlemanfinn]

I own Photoshop. It shouldent be a problem:)

I have startet experimenting and hope for the best. Right now i am using a with og 700px. It may be to large but then i can just try a smaller size.

Thanks for all the help:)

[iesposta]

[quote=92505]I own Photoshop. It shouldent be a problem:)

I have startet experimenting and hope for the best. Right now i am using a with og 700px. It may be to large but then i can just try a smaller size.

Thanks for all the help:)
[/quote]
I find using a large size image, but reducing the colors makes an acceptable file.
First you only need 72 dpi.
Even 1920 x 1080 at 72 dpi and 256 colors is great for emulator selection pictures.
In Photoshop, choose export for web.
I make a png8 file with 256 or less colors, dither, no transparent background.
A large JPEG may only be 400KB, but decompressed it can use 5-6MB!
A png with 256 or 128 colors at 1080 may be 500KB, but that is neither compressed nor does it need to be scaled up.
I just described using this for 1920×1080 images, but you can do the same for game art.

[Anonymous]

In my experience, with all else being the same, larger images can cause some slowdown when scrolling through the games lists. From what I understand, EmulationStation doesn’t cache textures, which is part of the reason for the bottleneck. However, I have been using a Pi 1 B. I’d be curious to know how the Pi 2 handles larger images.

[gentlemanfinn]

I have maneged to replace the images using method 1, but the i get an error when closing emulationstation. It is something like “lvl10 cant save to gamelist.xml…”
when trying this method I didnt alter the path to the images, but instead just overwote the existing image in the download folder.

When I try to use method 2 the pictures isent showing, but the interfase acts like they are there..

Edit: Did a new scrape and used method 1. I have now replaced most og my snes covers with higher resolution images and am happy with this solution.

I have a new question:

Is it posible to replace the grey background when browsing games in an emulator with an image?

[gentlemanfinn]

Hey everybody I have some good news!

I have found what I was looking for..

In the pictures you can see where im going. By mistake I maneged to remove the gametitles, but i have afterwards restored them (the grey box is just big enough to have the games title and the highlightbox inside). As you can see i am missing the footer, but that have been restored too.

The picture of zelda is just one i have found for this experiment.

This is rough and far from done, but what do you think?

[gentlemanfinn]

another picture

[Roo]

Long time retro-gaming enthusiasts will recognize the advise I’m about to give you :)

If you are serious about some high quality box art, in-game screen captures and gamplay movies for use in your favorite front end, check out emumovies.com. They have all the above for every console and arcade emulator you can think of.

I’ve been a member there a long time, back when HyperSpin started taking off. Now you won’t be able to use the movies in ES, but I am using their 3D box art. They have 2D options as well. I think you can get some stuff without being a paying member, but with payment you get access to their FTP. And if your using standard no-intro game collections, all the art file names match up.

hint: It’d be awesome if the scraper had an option for pulling from emumovies! :)

[gentlemanfinn]

I have browsed the website you mentioned and have found it to be usefull. I havent downloaded anything yet, but it is looking promising :)

If i ever find a way to do the music i would be very pleased..

[dpicc68]

Is it possible to code in the following to retropie??

Print screen option when playing a game that saves in the images folder… Automatically updating rom art?…
This would be cool

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[gentlemanfinn]

I dont see how it is connected to my questions.. Would it be posible for you to ask this in another topic?

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