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Frontends

Overview

When generating a game list with Skyscraper you have the option of generating it for several different frontends. A frontend is the graphical interface that lists and launches your games.

Backup Any Manual Changes of Your Gamelists

Skyscraper will overwrite your game list (obviously). So if you have spend a lot of time hand-crafting metadata in a game list for any frontend, please remember to create a backup before overwriting it with Skyscraper. You can also tell Skyscraper to auto-backup old game lists prior to overwriting them. Read more about the gameListBackup config option.

Setting a frontend when generating a game list is done by setting the -f <FRONTEND> command-line parameter as explained in the commandline documentation or by setting it in /home/<USER>/.skyscraper/config.ini as explained config file documentation. Use for the <FRONTEND> value the frontend name all lowercase and with alphabetical characters only: emulationstation, esde, pegasus, retrobat, attractmode. Some frontends have further options that are either optional or required. Check the frontend sections below for more information on this.

When generating a game list for any frontend, Skyscraper will try to preserve certain metadata. Check the frontend sections below for more information on what metadata is preserved per frontend.

EmulationStation (default)

  • Default game list location: /home/<USER>/RetroPie/roms/<PLATFORM>
  • Default game list filename: gamelist.xml

This is the default frontend used when generating a game list with Skyscraper. If no frontend is defined on command-line or in config.ini it will fall back to generating for EmulationStation. By default the <USER> is pi on RetroPie setups.

Metadata preservation

Skyscraper will preserve the following metadata when re-generating a game list for EmulationStation: favorite, hidden, kidgame, lastplayed, playcount, sortname. Also existing <folder/> elements of a gamelist file will be preserved. The user editable sub-XML elements for a folder are listed in the Metadata.cpp of EmulationStation.

Folder Data is Not Cached

Folder data is not cached by Skyscraper, thus if you delete your gamelist.xml, Skyscraper can not restore the edited folder elements from cache.

Automatic addition of folder elements if addFolder is true:
If at least one ROM is within a subfolder and this subfolder is not yet part of the gamelist.xml file, it will be added with two mandatory subelements:

  • <path/> reflects the relative subpath from the system folder and
  • <name/>, which represents the direct parent folder of a ROM by default. However, you may edit this to any name which should be shown in EmulationStation.

Example

Consider this folder structure below snes, whereas each lowest folder contains at least one ROM: 

snes
└── Retail
    ├── EUR
    ├── JP
    └── USA
Skyscraper will generate these elements if not present in gamelist.xml and only if addFolders is set true: 
[...]
    <folder>
        <path>./Retail</path>
        <name>Retail</name>
    </folder>
    <folder>
        <path>./Retail/USA</path>
        <name>USA</name>
    </folder>
    <folder>
        <path>./Retail/JP</path>
        <name>JP</name>
    </folder>
    <folder>
        <path>./Retail/EUR</path>
        <name>EUR</name>
    </folder>
[...]
The Retail folder is added even if it does not contain a ROM because it is part of the path to the ROMs in the lowest folders.

EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE)

This is very similar to the default EmulationStation. This section only highlights the differences.

  • Default game list location: /home/<USER>/ES-DE/gamelists/<PLATFORM>
  • Default game list filename: gamelist.xml

ROMs are expected to be in the input folder /home/<USER>/ROMs/<PLATFORM> for every <PLATFORM> you scrape.

Media filepaths (screenshots, marquees, videos, aso.) are not held in the gamelist file. This is ES-DE default. However, Skyscraper will put the media files into the downloaded_media folder (e.g. ~/ES-DE/downloaded_media/<PLATFORM>/screenshots/ for screenshots) from where ES-DE will pick them up. ES-DE does not support textures currently. Any manual or fanart data present in the cache will be put automagically into ~/ES-DE/downloaded_media/<PLATFORM> where ES-DE will load it.

Tip

You may override the default storage folder of ES-DE (/home/<USER>/ES-DE) on a non-Windows build by setting the environment variable ESDE_APPDATA_DIR to a different folder as documented in the ES-DE documentation.

All the gory details of ES-DE's gamelist file format you can find in the section "Gamelist Reference" in the [ES-DE documentation] (https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/INSTALL.md?ref_type=heads#gamelistxml).

Metadata preservation

Skyscraper will, additionally to EmulationStation preserved metadata, retain the following metadata when re-generating a game list for ES-DE: altemulator, broken, collectionsortname, completed, controller, hidemetadata, nogamecount, nomultiscrape. Also existing <folder/> elements of a gamelist file will be preserved: For these on top is the folderlink element is preserved.

RetroBat

  • Default game list location: /home/<USER>/RetroPie/roms/<PLATFORM>
  • Default game list filename: gamelist.xml

This is modeled after EmualtionStation as it uses it with slight differences.

Batocera

Over time the fork of EmulationStation in Batocera has diverted stark from the initial EmulationStation. Thus, the gamelist format is somewhat different, but the textual scraping elements are still the same. Most notably Batocera EmulationStation stores a lot of additional information in the gamelist, and the set of information may differ for each game.
Skyscraper aims to cover the most frequent used elements for scraping, currently fanarts, manuals and videos. See the scraping modules for support of these mediafiles.

This is the complete set of scraping binary data supported by Skyscraper:

Batocera Gamelist XML-Element Skyscraper support
thumbnail (cover) ✓
fanart ✓
image (in game Screenshot) ✓
manual ✓
marquee ✓
video ✓
wheel ✓

ROMs are expected to be in the input folder /userdata/roms/<PLATFORM> for every <PLATFORM> you scrape.

  • Default game list location: /userdata/roms/<PLATFORM>
  • Default game list filename: gamelist.xml
  • Default media file location: /userdata/roms/<PLATFORM>/{images,videos,manuals}

If you set a game list location and do not specifiy the ROM folder (input folder) and media folder, then these are set relatively to the game list folder.

Metadata preservation

These extra elements are preserved when they are present in the Gamelist file.

Batocera Gamelist XML-Element When present in Gamelist
bezel Preserved
boxart Preserved
boxback Preserved
cartridge Preserved
magazine Preserved
map Preserved
mix Preserved
music Preserved
thumbnail Preserved
titleshot Preserved

Also, all other non scrapable elements are preserved (Batocera EmulationStation adds those on occasion) like: cheevosHash, cheevosId, scrap, ...

Usage of Skyscraper for Batocera

It is possible to compile Skyscraper on Batocera supported systems but you will need the build-toolchain (at least GCC, make and Qt). Additionally, the configuration files must be installed in a defined location (see the PREFIX option in the top-level README.md, if you are keen to compile Skyscraper on Batocera).

A more convienient way is to use Skyscraper from you Desktop system: Below you can find a step-by-step guide for Linux systems, macOS should be similar. Windows desktop users can use SMB shares and can adapt the following steps.

  1. For a pass-through of the screenshot without any artwork do copy the batocera-artwork.xml alongside to your config.ini. Add the artwork file in your configuration file as seen in the config.ini.example.
  2. Mount the root folder of Batocera in your Desktop system. Let the mountpoint be /home/mylogin/bato_sshfs in this example: 
    mount -t sshfs root@batocera:/ /home/mylogin/bato_sshfs
  3. Change to the platform folder (in this case snes) you want to scrape: 
    cd /home/mylogin/bato_sshfs/userdata/roms/snes
  4. Then run on your Desktop system to scrape data from screenscraper and put it into the Skyscraper cache on your Desktop system: 
    Skyscraper -s screenscraper -p snes --flags fanarts,manuals,videos -i "$(pwd)"
-g "$(pwd)" -o "$(pwd)"
    You can also set the values for input- (-i), gamelist- (-g) und media-folder (-o) permanently in the Skyscraper config file. You can find a sample configuration at the [batocera] section (at the end of config.ini.example): 
    [batocera]
artworkXml="batocera-artwork.xml"
gameListFolder="~/bato_sshfs/userdata/roms"
; relative to gameListFolder
inputFolder="."
mediaFolder="."
;videos="true"
    With this addition the Skyscraper invocation is reduced to: 
    Skyscraper -f batocera -p <platform>
    You may also set the default frontend in the configuration, then you can even drop the -f CLI parameter.
  5. Afterwards run the gamelist creation and media file deployment from cache: 
    Skyscraper -f batocera -p snes --flags videos -i "$(pwd)" -g "$(pwd)" -o
"$(pwd)"
  6. Do a SSH login to your Batocera system and restart the EmulationStation 
    batocera-es-swissknife --restart && emulationstation-standalone
    Leave the SSH shell open to reload EmulationStation with Ctrl+C for subsequent gamelist reloads. You can also restart the whole system, however it takes longer.
  7. Navigate to the system/platform you just scraped to review the scraping result.

New to Skyscraper?

For starters I suggest to enable (set true) these settings: unattended, unattendedSktip and most importantly gameListBackup. If you have precious media files which you may want to keep make also a manual backup of the media folders of. Also you will have to add your credentials for Screenscraper for example in the config file of Skyscraper.

For general advise on SSH usage and the default password see the Batocera documentation.

Attract-Mode

  • Default game list location: /home/<USER>/.attract/romlists
  • Default game list filename: <EMULATOR/PLATFORM>.txt

Attract-Mode is a bit more abstract when it comes to how it saves its game lists and media. To export for Attract-Mode you need to, in addition to setting the frontend, set -e <EMULATOR> on command-line or in config.ini. The <EMULATOR> is a file that describes the platform / emulator you are generating a game list for. The file contains everything needed to tell Attract-Mode how to launch games for the platform, and even where to find the media files for the games (such as screenshots and videos).

If you are running RetroPie most of the <EMULATOR> files will have been auto-generated for you. They are usually named the same as the platform you are generating a game list for. So, if you are generating for snes you simply use Skyscraper -p snes -f attractmode -e snes and that should work just fine. The <EMULATOR> files are usually located at /home/<USER>/.attract/emulators/. Check them out if you are curious.

Metadata preservation

Skyscraper will preserve the following metadata when re-generating a game list for Attract-Mode: altromname, alttitle, buttons, cloneof, control, displaycount, displaytype, extra, rotation, status.

Pegasus

  • Default game list location: /home/<USER>/RetroPie/roms/<PLATFORM>
  • Default game list filename: metadata.pegasus.txt

Pegasus is easy and simple to generate a game list for. Simply do Skyscraper -p <PLATFORM> -f pegasus. If you want to specify a custom launch command (if you are using RetroPie you don't have to, a default one will be used), you can set it on command-line with -e "<COMMAND>" or in config.ini with:

[pegasus]
launch="<COMMAND>"

You need to add the individual platform rom directories to Pegasus (if they are not already defined) before any of them will show up! Start the Pegasus frontend, press ESC on the keyboard and choose Settings -> Set game directories. Simply point it to each individual platform sub-directory. For RetroPie you should have a path for each platform (eg. /home/<USER>/RetroPie/roms/snes, /home/<USER>/RetroPie/roms/megadrive etc.).

Info

If you are generating game lists for Pegasus, it is highly recommended to disable third-party game list data sources! Otherwise you will have a mish-mash or different sources showing up in Pegasus. Start the Pegasus frontend, press ESC on the keyboard and choose Settings -> Enable/disable data sources and disable everything in that submenu.
Then reload the game lists or restart Pegasus, and all of the platforms should show up with media and game information generated by Skyscraper.

Metadata preservation

Skyscraper will preserve any metadata key-value pairs added to the header and / or individual game list entries.