An auto-scraper for EmulationStation written in Go using hashes. This currently works with NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBC, GBA, MD, SMS, 32X, GG, PCE, A2600, LNX, MAME(see below), Dreamcast(bin/gdi), PSX(bin/cue) ROMs.

The script works by crawling a directory of ROM files looking for known extensions. When it finds a file it hashes the ROM data minus any headers or special file formatting with the goal of hashing only the data pulled from the original game. It compares this hash to a DB I've compiled to look up the correct game in theGamesDB.net. It downloads the metadata and builds the gamelist.xml file.

Make sure you have go version 1.2 or later installed.

$ go version
go version go1.2.1 linux/amd64

Fetch and build.

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

$ cd <rom directory>
$ scraper

ROMs will be scanned and a gamelist.xml file will be created. All images will be placed inside the images folder.

The scraper now supports MAME but using file names instead of hashing. Since it uses a different DB and lookup method, several of the command line flags no longer apply. When the -mame flag is used it disables all other databases and the mamedb only has the one size of image so the flags about thumbnails, gdb, ovgdb, etc don't do anything.

$ scraper -mame

You can choose your preference of image type with the mame_img flag. If you prefer marquees but want to fallback to titles then snapshots you can do:

$ scraper -mame -mame_img "m,t,s"

There are several command flags you can pass. To see a full list use -help

$ scraper -help

At the time of writing this raspbian has an old version of go 1.0.2 so you can cross-compile on another system or download an unofficial go binary from http://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs.

$ GOARM=6 GOARCH=arm GOOS=linux go build github.com/sselph/scraper

$ GOARM=7 GOARCH=arm GOOS=linux go build github.com/sselph/scraper

Replace the release_name with the release like v0.6.3-beta

$ wget https://github.com/sselph/scraper/releases/download/<release_name>/scraper_rpi.zip
$ sudo unzip scraper_rpi.zip scraper -d /usr/local/bin/

$ wget https://github.com/sselph/scraper/releases/download/<release_name>/scraper_rpi2.zip
$ sudo unzip scraper_rpi2.zip scraper -d /usr/local/bin/

Add thumb_only can speed things up since the pi doesn't have a ton of memory.

$ cd ~/RetroPie/roms/<rom_dir>
$ scraper -thumb_only

$ scraper -scrape_all -thumb_only