Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Raspberry Pi & RetroPie


So what do you do with a Raspberry Pi?  Well to start with I built a case out of lego, never too old!!


Got loads of ideas like the next version of my birdcam but lack of time hasn't been on my side to progress, I tried a build of XBMC but was to sluggish for my liking on my 256Mb Pi.

Finally I settled on an RetroPie install from an image and plodded my way through the setup instructions, not too bad as most are already setup but not being from the linux world where sudo is the kill command it was a case on slowly going through the instructions.  One area to setup is the fanart, there's a ES Script that does much of the work but does miss some or picks the wrong details for you.  So being from the world of Windows - groan I hear ;) I wrote a crude visual basic app to help fill in the gaps, which you can see a screenshot below.

You can download my 'less crude' app from my Google Drive - Retropie Metadata Manager v2

Update: New version at link above designed to work with the new RetroPie v2.X directory structures as well as ReproPie v1.X, also added a few more sources to search for FanArt - Original version available here - Retropie Metadata Manager v1

Basic Steps
  • Run RetroPie.exe
  • Follow instructions on Settings Tab to get setup in copying files from your Pi
  • Go to Main Tab and select an emulator
  • Select game from next list, details should appear on right side, which you can update a save via [Update] button
  • If you don't have the fan art, type a search term and press one of the three buttons to manual find what you want
  • The rest you'll need to figure out :)



12 comments:

jedi said...

App crashes everytime I click Get GameList. Gives an Unhandled exception saying: An error occured while parsing EntityName. Line 993, position 20. I'm in Windows 7 64-bit.

lakeuk said...

The app is something I've knocked so afraid won't capture every possible error.

I've been able to reproduce the error and I'm think the error is due to an invalid character in your gamelist.xml file on line 993, pos 20, taking a guess that you may have one of the following characters below at that point, remove it or replace and try again.

< < less than
> > greater than
& & ampersand
' ' apostrophe
" " quotation mark



Anonymous said...

Hi! Can you upload your old script again, for those who still are using retropie 1.x?

lakeuk said...

Current version should be ok with the structures used in RetroPie v1.X - the gamelist.xml files are still the same across versions it's just the locations of fanart has changes and this can be set on the second tab. I've added link to the original file to the post above

TheProjectToInfinity said...

Hi,

I have correctly entered the settings, however when I click on the console (in this case NES), I get the following error

http://pastebin.com/A3ezVt9w

Do you know what this means?

lakeuk said...

Not seeing your gamelist.xml file for nes I'm guessing the first line in the xml isn't valid formed xml, I'd expect to see this as the first line:=



lakeuk said...

Ok I can't post an example, example is here under section XML Encodeing:-


http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_encoding.asp

TheProjectToInfinity said...

Hi! Many thanks for replying to me so quickly.

I've changed my XML file as per your link, so it now reads:






however when I click on the NES folder in the Main window, nothing appears. Am I doing something else wrong?

Many thanks!

lakeuk said...

I don't know, if you upload the xml file you're having a problem with and I see if it loads at my end

TheProjectToInfinity said...

XML - http://www24.zippyshare.com/v/44007645/file.html

There's literally nothing it in , which I presume is how it's supposed to be when using the program for the first time (?)

lakeuk said...

The gamelist.xml file you've supplied I'm able to see with no errors at my end so stumped on what it could be or how to reproduce the error. The tags are what you'd expect to see for an empty xml file.

As it's empty has helped though as my app hasn't been designed to be able to add new game metadata (on the long to-do list), it's only designed to amend existing metadata that emulationstation has provided.

Way to do it is to have emulation station have a go are screenscraping then the roms in your nes folder then copy of the gamelist.xml files for my app to have a go at amending the file. I have noticed a change in how emulationstation scrapes in that if rom has no details scrapes then it no longer adds any details to the gamelist.xml, on my to-do list is at add a dummy entry to gamelist.xml to allow details to be added through my app.

TheProjectToInfinity said...

Ah I understand now! Sorry for the confusion.

I've now scraped all my games in Emulationstation and added in the ones it missed. I need to correct quite a few games that have been scraped incorrectly, mind you.

Unfortunately I can't now load the NES .XML file into your app as it's coming up with the following error:

'Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 60, position 167.

I thought this is strange as it works ok in Emulationstation (?)


XML file: http://www22.zippyshare.com/v/64087572/file.html