HOWTO guide: sselph/scraper


You can be a messy in your life, your sexual orientation or your room, but the vast majority have well cataloged our films & TV shows, and above all our ROM emulators: With its covers, description,... an odyssey if not exist tools like I am going to present today, called **scraper**.

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*Scraper* in the world of emulators are those programs with the goal of search for us all the information about a game to present it in our *Front-end* favorite with the best looking possible.

*RetroPie* comes with a very powerful scraper programmed in *Python*, [ES-scraper](https://github.com/petrockblog/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/ES-scraper). Today I present an alternative programmed on *Go* simply called *scraper*, running on the terminal of your operating system.

[ Requisites ]

First we need to install the **Go** language. You have packages for any operating system, including source code on [this link](https://golang.org/dl/). I'll teach you to install it on any of them. At the time of publishing this article, the latest version of *Go is the 1.4.2*. According to the process, sometimes you don't get the latest version (is the case of *Ubuntu*), but no matter.

Mac (through brew):

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew doctor
brew update && brew upgrade
brew install go

Linux, Raspberry Pi, ODROID (Ubuntu) [(+ info)](http://ask.xmodulo.com/install-go-language-linux.html):

Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install golang

Fedora, CentOS/RHEL: sudo yum install golang

For the rest of ARM boards, visit the next [link](http://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs).

Now download the source code and compile scraper:

mkdir ~/go && cd $_
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH="$GOPATH/bin:$PATH"
(Mac only) export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/opt/go/libexec/bin"

go get github.com/sselph/scraper
go build github.com/sselph/scraper

[ Use ]

With scraper -help we can see all the available parameters. Click to enlarge

**NOW** you can use the program from any directory with ROMs, typing **scraper** in most cases. With mame ROMs, we will use **scraper -mame**. It is interesting to know some of the parameters. For example with ROMs for mame, we can use **scraper -mame -mame_img "t, s"** to download the title img or catch a screenshot if not find the first one.


Scraper generates a gamelist.xml file and the images dir

Once we have made the whole process, we would just to copy the images directory and the *gamelist.xml* file to the path *~/.emulationstation/gamelists/console_type* on *RetroPie, Recalbox* or any project with *EmulationStation*.

To help you to know if failed to recognize a title, I recommend you when run the scraper, copy its output to a file with **scraper > Games.txt** and then **cat Games.txt | grep 'ERR '**

If *EmulationStation* have problems with recognize the images, execute the following command that point to the file *gamelist.xml* previously generated:

sed -i -e 's/.\/images\//~\/.emulationstation\/downloaded_images\/fba/ig' /path/to/gamelist.xml

[ Conclusion: The Perfect scraper ]

This system will save much time and effort to have all your ROMs with their pictures and some interesting info. It is a very valid alternative to the scraper that comes with *EmulationStation*, but more customizable. It takes a few seconds to recognize and download the information of each ROM. In my case (*iMac*), **685 ROMS has been scanned in 14 minutes**. Now you can choose if you want to go from this...


to this



Link: [github.com > sselph/scraper](https://github.com/sselph/scraper)