Kodi Community Forum

(2013-06-18, 07:25)malte Wrote: [ -> ]Ok, I am back again and I will have a look into the scraping issue in the next days. I just made a quick test and for me it scraped and showed the year correct with mobygames and thegamsdb. It also downloaded all artwork. But there seems to be an issue to display the downloaded artwork. I will have to test all this more in detail. Can anybody show me a log of a scraping process where it did not scrape year and artwork correctly?

I will also go through the thread and try to answer all unanswered questions of the last weeks. But this may take a while. Thanks for your patience

I'll get a log up probably Saturday, thanks.

New test version available: 2.0.7

List of changes:

Import Games

• updated list of thegamesdb platforms
  
• bugfix: scraping games with (...) and [...] in name did not work in accurate mode
  

This release should fix the scraper issues that have been reported lately. There was a bug with handling games that have special info in the game name like (EU) or stuff like this. These games could only be scraped in interactive mode, otherwise RCB could not find them during online scraping.

While I was checking the scraper code I realized that thegamesdb added a bunch of platforms since my last check, so I also added some platforms to RCBs thegamesdb scraper (Amiga, Gameboy Color, ...).

Previous version: 2.0.6

Awesome, thank you very much Malte. I'll test this week!

for some reason, I cannot get al gmes to scrape within a set. ike for instance super mario 3 wont scrape for the NES rom set even after i have scraped multiple times. also i have multiple games that i cant get to scrape for the playstation 2 rom set. any help would be appreciated

Awesome will try it out thanks Malte!

I will start to answer old unanswered questions from the last weeks now. So don't wonder about all the old stuff that is popping up in the next days.

NewYears1978 Wrote:Problem: Save states don't work, I assume this is due to the script copying the rom file to a temp folder in appdata... but I can't seem to make it work no matter what. I don't want the popup in RCB asking about save states I want to be able to use normal savestates as I can in my emu (Zsnes in this case) as normal...I can't figure a way to do this aside from putting my save states in the tmp folder. (Edit tried copying to tmp they still don't work. They work fine when emulator is launched by itself...but from XBMC RCB..they won't)

malte Wrote:Maybe you can try to enable Do not extract zip files in Edit Rom Collection dialog (if your emulator supports running compressed files). Then the files should not be copied to the tmp dir.

I tried the zip file thing but it turns out even when I put all my saves in the tmp folder they still didn't work.

Copying the savestate to the tmp folder won't work as RCB will always wipe out all files in this folder before it launches a game. Only option could be to not extract zip files.

NewYears1978 Wrote:I tried editing launcher.py and changed the launch line for applaunch-vbs.bat to applaunch-vbs.vbs, I then made a file applaunch-vbs.vbs with this

Code:
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\addon_data\script.games.rom.collecti?on.browser\scriptfiles\applaunch-vbs.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

It seemed to launch it but a cmd window pops up and I am kicked back to XBMC. Any ideas?

There is a ? in "script.games.rom.collecti?on.browser". Maybe this is the issue?

NewYears1978 Wrote:Could you possible just add a command line or something to make the cmd window launch minimized?

I added this to my list (although I guess it was already there)

djR3Z Wrote:I'm trying to change the skin but the setting doesn't seem to take. I change it in the add on settings but the GUI still looks the same. Am I missing something?

Depends on your main skin. If your main skin (e.g. MQ4, Aeon Nox, Ace) does have RCB support, XBMC will always use the skin files from the skin and completely ignores the files from the addon. Only option is to delete or rename the file "script-Rom_Collection_Browser-main.xml" and all "script-RCB-xxx.xml" files from the skin folder.

blinken Wrote:I have about 1500 roms that I've downloaded for all the games sitting in the boxes in my attic, however nine times out of ten RCB will freeze after getting to around 1200 roms loaded in the list.

Is the program not designed for this many roms? It was working perfectly before, but I recently updraded to 12.2 and 2.0.6 and now this is my problem. Is there any reason in particular that the list would repeatedly freeze (I'm sick of CTRL ALT DLTing)

Just tested this with 5k items several times and it worked without any issues.

blinken Wrote:Edit 3: I removed all the folders containing my roms and the list loads perfectly now. There must be a conflict with all the stored data. How is RCB loading all the box art when the box art is stored with the ROMS? I see that all the box art is also stored in my userdata folder with all my movie data, why would it create all the folders within my game folders like boxfront boxback etc, then also store data within my regular userdate folder? It seems the crash is directly related to the data being in two separate places. Any thoughts?

EDIT 4: It seems RCB doesn't use any of the data stored within the boxfront, boxback etc folders, it is only using the thumbnail information stored within the userdata, thumbnail folder. Is there a way to tell the program to use the other folders instead?

This is weird. RCB does not use the roms until you want to play a game. RCB stores all info (path to the roms and path to artwork) in its database and starts loading the info from db. RCB tells XBMC to load your artwork from its original location (e.g. SNES/artwork/boxfront/MyGame.jpg). The first time you do this, XBMC will make a copy of your artwork in the userdata cache folders and adds a link from the original location to the new cache location in its textures.db (I can't control this behaviour from RCB).

So, no idea why it crashes for you. And no idea why it stops crashing when you delete your rom folders.

Ghostdivision Wrote:I was wondering if anyone could help me, I am trying to setup the kega fusion sega emulator, and everythings working except roms dont appear to be loading.

The file type they are in is a 7z, i also extracted them and they were .md filetype, I cant seem to get them working, advanced launcher perameter page mentions zips or bins, so I am not sure what I should do?

Did you try these steps mentioned in the FAQ?

NewYears1978 Wrote:BTW which applaunch files are the RIGHT ones to edit I see them in multiple locations and notice they always get copied when run.

The right ones are in "userdata\addon_data\script.games.rom.collection.browser\scriptfiles". RCB should only copy them at the first time you use them. Later on it should always use the files in the userdata folder so you should be able to edit them. This is the reason why I do it like this because the files in the script folder will be renewed every time you install a new version of RCB.

Ghostdivision Wrote:I also wanted to request for the author if possible to allow us to select network drives ourselves during setup like with movies or music if thats at all possible? When I first setup rcb i could not figure out why I could not select my network drives, just a suggestion.

This is already possible. It might happen that you have to add your network drives in XBMC file manager before you can access them in RCBs setup wizard.

Thanks for the answers malte. I gave up awhile back on the no window solution as it just really isn't that big of a deal..I might revisit it later but for now am content. Since you have it on your list anyways I am sure some day you will fix it

The save files I couldn't get working either..the only way was using the built in save function and options..but this is fine too so I left it that way. All is well now for the most part..except the year scraping but I have not tried the beta yet

Thanks!

Ok, next round:

teeedubb Wrote:Just thought I'd share something I did the other day - its real obvious now that I look back on it, I can't believe it took me so long to do!. I dual boot Openelec for media and windows7 for gaming, with all my games and emulators artwork in sub folders in the one folder. In windows I pointed the screensaver add on to the artwork directory and now when xbmc is idle it displays images from all the games and emulators that has been scraped online by RCB and ALA. Very cool

Nice idea. Didn't came to my mind.

Dondi once wrote about a screensaver starting MAME roms in attract mode. This made me think of having a playlist of gameplay videos that could be started as screensaver. But I did not yet try out if/how this works.

Ghostdivision Wrote:I also want to ask for whatever reason I no longer see with rcb the option to download all artwork during the inital setup and scrapping? How do i scrape all the artwork? Is their a download all artwork option? All im getting is front boxart during setup and import, when I setup emu's a few months ago it gave me the option during setup to add all the artwork (cartridge, fanart, ect..)

If you use online scraping it should download all available artwork types automatically. Note that not all scraped sites provide all types of artwork.

In offline scrape mode you have to add every folder of your available artwork manually. But RCB should always ask if there is more artwork if you are going through the setup wizard.

Mixy Wrote:Hello! I checked the FAQ, and couldnt find the issue there. My problem is that some games launch, other dont. Ie. Super Mario Bros launches but not the sequel. They are both in the same ROM collection, so have the same launcha arguments and same emulator. All i can see is "Launching Super Mario Bros 2", but nothing happens. Still in XBMC with remotes working there.

Did you test if the game can be launched outside XBMC with the command line that RCB uses? You will find it in the log.

Are there any other errors in the log?

Aubrien Wrote:I'm running xbmc 12.2 on an ubuntu 13.04 system and I noticed that when I launch an emulator (not in solo mode) that audio engine in xbmc blocks the alsa audio sink and prevents the emulator from grabbing it. This means no sound in emulators. The workarounds I found were to...

1 - Use solo mode
2 - Disable gui sounds all together
3 - Modify the file addons/script.games.rom.collection.browser/resources/lib/launcher.py

Option 1 is no good as I dont want to have to quit and come back every time I select a new game. Option 2 is no good as I dont want to have to disable a feature to make another one work. Option 3 is good and easy. I followed the guidance at the following location...
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1413513

Any chance on seeing something like this put into the addon for us linux users? I saw in another post that angelscry added it in advanced launcher but it looks to be missing from rcb still. Or is there some other preferred method to do this? Though this works perfectly for me.

Thanks for the hint. I was not aware of this issue. I will add this in one of the next releases.

deco Wrote:i got the 2 roms, bzone.zip and bzonec.zip in my roms dir, and no matter how much is scrap, import and go for a walk ONLY one of them gets into the RCB database, the one called bzone.zip, and sadly enough it's the other one that actually works when using it straight from mame. see bzone fails with missing files or something, bzonec does not, but bzonec does not work without bzone being there... so.. i guess my question is:

why is bzonec not being imported into the list?

Do you use the offline MAME descriptions? It only contains bzone and not bzonec. This might be the reason.

Ghostdivision Wrote:Im not sure how to really give a helpful log because its like rcb just does not even recognize f-zero or frogger, I tried to import them doing manual matches and it would not even pick these games up. Yet it did scrape them, it just wont let me import them.

I looked inside the nfo and there is no description for the game scrapped...

This depends on the setting Don't import games without description. If you disable this setting the game should be imported but you will not see any artwork or description. You can hide these games via Missing Info Filter and rescrape them at a later time.

The scraper issue itself should (hopefully) be solved with latest test release.

Ghostdivision Wrote:For malte, I cant find any log why f-zero and frogger wont import, or why rcb acts like it does not see those games.
But here is 1080 snowboarding issue, i have to scrape this one manually all the time.

Trying to import it manually i wonder if the 1080 with the degree symbol is causing this issue. I dont know how to make a degree symbol (that tiny circle after 1080) but i would hope rcb would not be this picky.

Does this break the whole import or does it just not scrape this one game?
Non-ascii characters have always been a problem. They have to be handled differently with different python version, different operating systems and maybe different XBMC versions (but I guess only because of different python versions). When I got it to work with one combination it failed for the other. So one day I gave up and just try not to break the whole import because of one game with non-ascii characters.

st graveyard Wrote:Quick question for Newyears1978 or anyone using MQ4. Anybody out there ever been able to get the developer and publisher icons working for RCB? These are in the extrapack of MQ4. I've seen screenshots with these logo's but never got them to work myself. anyone?

I'm ashamed . Its still on my list to test this (I know you requested this a year ago).

Ghostdivision Wrote:Also question for malte i am noticing whenever I am in rcb scripts cannot go off. So if i leave my pc on rcb and have library auto update go off or i also use the scheduler to automate cdart program, it does not seem to work. It works fine outside rcb, but whenever your in rcb no automated script seem to work properly. THe log shows it launches but then does nothing. If your outside rcb the scripts work fine

Does this work with other long running scripts? Not sure if I am doing something wrong in RCB or if this is a limitation of XBMC.

corpgator Wrote:A couple things, why doesn't RCB scrape the year for any of my games? It just says not available. Also, how do I get it to download artwork other than boxcovers? As of now, that is all it downloads and then it displays that as the background.

I was able to scrape the year in my latest tests. Does it really not scrape the year or does it just not show in the UI? You can check if it writes the year to the nfo file. Maybe it is a skin issue. If it does not scrape it can you tell me some game names and what scrapers you used?

About artwork it might be solved with latest test release. Otherwise please show me an xbmc.log after you tried to import games.

yomammary Wrote:I've been having the same (fullscreen) problem. Whenever I launch an emulator (Jnes) and XBMC goes to power saving mode, XBMC doesn't go back to full screen, meaning I have to press Alt-enter.
Any ideas?

Maybe I could check to prevent XBMC from going to power saving mode. Not sure if this is possible or wanted.

(2013-06-21, 07:44)malte Wrote: [ -> ].

st graveyard Wrote:Quick question for Newyears1978 or anyone using MQ4. Anybody out there ever been able to get the developer and publisher icons working for RCB? These are in the extrapack of MQ4. I've seen screenshots with these logo's but never got them to work myself. anyone?

I'm ashamed . Its still on my list to test this (I know you requested this a year ago).

I'm just happy it is still on your list ;-) There is no hurry.
Cheers...

By the way, the audio not releasing sync issue happens with Windows as well. It's a bug I reported starting in 12.0 and have given up on. I have reported it several times and it has been "fixed" several times but it has never been really fixed.

Anyway, it will make his horrible noise of the last few miliseconds of sound you played in xbmc repeating ad infinitum and keep repeating it unless you set XBMC to not use exclusive mode then the program will just wrest control away and the noise will stop.

Hi, I have xbmcbuntu with Frodo 12.2 using intel and nvidia drivers. When I launch rom collection browser after starting up xbmc, it all loads up fine (using snes9x). Then when I exit the emulator, I can't launch rom collection browser again. Just sits there on the program addons screen...

help?

Something is messed up in the latest 2.0.7. I tried adding a collection and it downloaded the artwork and such, but it won't display anything. I have to do a clean database and then it shows all my games. When I switch to that collection, it does nothing until I pick something from one of the filters and then go back to all. Here's the error it's throwing.

Quote:17:36:01 T:2568 ERROR: EXCEPTION: argument "label" for method "XBMCAddon::xbmcgui::ListItem" must be unicode or str
17:36:01 T:2568 ERROR: EXCEPTION Thrown (PythonToCppException) : -->Python callback/script returned the following error<--
- NOTE: IGNORING THIS CAN LEAD TO MEMORY LEAKS!
Error Type: <type 'exceptions.TypeError'>
Error Contents: argument "label" for method "XBMCAddon::xbmcgui::ListItem" must be unicode or str
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\Games.HTPC\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\script.games.rom.collection.browser\resources\lib\gui.py", line 267, in onInit
self.loadViewState()
File "C:\Users\Games.HTPC\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\script.games.rom.collection.browser\resources\lib\gui.py", line 1515, in loadViewState
self.showPublisher(False, False)
File "C:\Users\Games.HTPC\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\script.games.rom.collection.browser\resources\lib\gui.py", line 533, in showPublisher
self.showFilterControl(rows, CONTROL_PUBLISHER, showEntryAllItems, rcDelete, rDelete)
File "C:\Users\Games.HTPC\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\script.games.rom.collection.browser\resources\lib\gui.py", line 559, in showFilterControl
items.append(xbmcgui.ListItem(row[util.ROW_NAME], str(row[util.ROW_ID]), "", ""))
TypeError: argument "label" for method "XBMCAddon::xbmcgui::ListItem" must be unicode or str
-->End of Python script error report<--

The space where the publisher should be is completely blank and sometimes the space for the A-Z filter is blank as well until I remove that collection and then it goes back to normal.

Edit: Ok, the problem is with thegamesdb.net .nfo. When I delete the games from the collection and then re-add them using just archive.vg, everything works fine.

Sorry to be a pest, but why does music stop when I enter RCB? Any that I have playing is cut off immediately. I would really like to have some ambient video game music playing as I browse my collection.

This should be the last round of posts that I missed during me absence (I did not yet check the posts since my return last week). So, if I forgot anybody feel free to remind me.

codeseven Wrote:Hey guys, I'm needing a bit of assistance. Basically I believe I've set up RCB like I should and it scrapes information fine. What I'm running into is when I launch a ROM it minimizes the XBMC window like it's about to do something, but then brings it right back up without ever launching anything. An example if that would help - I am using the ZSNES emu with parameter -m -c "%ROM%" and ROM file mask *.zip because I like to keep my ROMs in zip files. I also have it set to unzip .ZIP files and have toggled the option for Popen just to see if that would help but it doesn't. Again it just acts like its about to launch, minimizes XBMC, then reopens it and nothing ever happens. Any help would be great!

Did you check if you can launch the game outside XBMC? It is explained here how to check this.

buymeapc Wrote:Is there a way to set a collection as a submenu on the home menu? Like, browse to the main menu and select Games>SNES and have it display my SNES collection within RCB? I'd like to do this for all my collections (PSX, SNES, NES, etc.) and I can't quite seem to find out how.

Is it a matter of setting the collection as a favorite? The only favorite option I can find is the favorite *within* RCB which XBMC doesn't seem to recognize outside of RCB.

Sorry, I don't think that this is possible atm. I added this to my list. I always had in mind to add kind of a dashboard start page where you get some statistics about your games and infos for every single console. From this page it should be possible to enter the current views for one selected console. So, allowing to enter RCB with a console as parameter might be the first step into this direction.

corpgator Wrote:Thanks for all of the help. I've found that there simply isn't good artwork out there except from thegamesdb.net, but it doesn't download. All I get is box front and back on initial scrape. I then have to either go game by game or do delete games only from remove collection. After that, I import the games with interactive and disable all trackers but thegamedb and it gets the rest of the artwork.

It's quicker than going to the site and searching game by game, but does anyone know why it doesn't just pick them up on its own?

I tested with 2.0.7 and it grabbed exactly the artwork that was available on thegamesdb.net. I tested with 10 games and it found box front and back for nearly all games, fanart for some games and screenshot only for 1 game. Can you give me an example of a game where the artwork is available on thegamesdb and RCB did not scrape it?

NewYears1978 Wrote:Is there a way to run RCB with set filters? Command line in Advanced Launcher for instance that might start with SNES filter ? I looked through all the docs and did not see a way to do this..but surely it's possible?

As written above (answer to buymeapc) this is not done yet.

NewYears1978 Wrote:I still can't figure out how to UNCACHE images and rescrape them..without having to delete the whole collection and reimport it.

Sometimes it works, most the time not. I tried rescraping one game, all games, using local artwork option, I made sure in options was set to rescrape already imported games..but it doesn't work.

This is a real pain if I Need to add or change one image I have to redo the whole collection, resetup the configs and all...

Usually deleting the tetxtures.db file works but the last few times that hasn't worked..is there a way around this?

I can only control the RCB rescraping part and that is working for me as I expect it. I don't know how the caching part of XBMC works. I also don't want to mess around with the XBMC cache from RCB. This might be error prone and I am quite sure that the way XBMC handles the cache might change from release to release.

NewYears1978 Wrote:One thing I am trying to figure out is how to include multiple revisoins of the same game. No intro sets all have like Rev 1 or Rev a and all that...but RCB only takes one of them and it's usually not the one you would want (the latest revision). I went through manually deleting the regular games that had revisions but that was a huge pain. I wonder if there's a solution to that..

As st graveyard already suggested, one way could be to store different versions in one zip or 7z file.

RCB could import more versions of the same game if they had different descriptions and game names. None of the online sources that RCB scrapes atm provides this information. So, the only way would be to provide offline descriptions or nfo files that contain version specific information about the game.

In a future release I have in mind to allow adding different versions of the game with the same info and artwork. So all different versions of a game would be linked to the same info in db.

toki5 Wrote:o, i got it to work, for some reason it seem to have stopped at e though, i cant get the whole collection in rcb. anybody have any ideas as to what this problem coud be?

This should not happen anymore (so I hoped). As written some days back, RCB should skip games that it can't scrape because of errors but should continue scraping the rest of your collection.

Can you show me an xbmc.log after this error occured?

NewYears1978 Wrote:This is all taking me so long. I am using only 3 artwork types, movie preview, fanart (my custom background) and cartridges (for boxart image)..

The issue is that most of the sets people have done different things, some remove the revision roms, some keep only the latest, etc. So my image sets I download often have missing or misnamed files I have to manually go through and first delete stuff I don't want (Foreign for instance) then I have been deleting multiple roms (keeping latest revision only.....your solution would have savedme time here lol). Then because the images I download are sometimes named wrong I have to check all three arts to match filenames..this is tedious..literally took me two nights to finish the SNES collection...and now on to the next..

So much work and so many rom sets left..I use emumovies and hyperspin art packs and such but for some reason they are not always named right..you have 20-30 files in each that are misnamed or something..

There is not much RCB can do about it right now until it would (but "never" will) add file handling options (deleting or renaming files). But you can always check the state of your collection using the Missing info filter. Maybe this gives you some good hints which games are missing artwork etc.

Thanks for all the answers Malte, we are slowly but surely getting things working and set up how we like despite issues or limitations!

Love the work and thanks