mamescraper 0.1

scrap mame games information and images

Scrap mame games information and images from ‘mame.bigode.net’ or ‘adb.arcadeitalia.net’ and generate a xml for use with EmulationStation.

About

The purpose of this scraper is to be simple and fast. Currently it supports two sources with drastically different scraping methodologies.

The default source (bigode) is a lot faster because the scraper will download an entire mame database (1.1MB compressed) and scrap all the games information in one go. Besides that, this source uses a CDN and a very fast webserver to serve the images, resulting in faster responses and downloading speed overall.

The adb source is a more traditional approach, for each game found, the scraper will do a http request to get the information needed and then will download the appropriate image.

It is important to note that the images flyers on ‘bigode’ source are smaller in size, because they have a fixed 400 width.

To illustrate the difference in scraping speed, the following shows the time spent scraping an entire mame 037b5 set (2241 roms) on both sources:

‘bigode’ source:

Command: mamescraper -w 10 -i title
Time spent: 1m 10s

‘adb’ source:

Command: mamescraper -w 10 -i title -s adb
Time spent: 8m 29s

Note that mamescraper was run with 10 workers and scraping titles only. If ran in ‘mixed’ image mode (default) the difference is even higher, since images flyers are bigger on adb:

‘bigode’ source:

Command: mamescraper -w 10
Time spent: 2m 2s

‘adb’ source:

Command: mamescraper -w 10 -s adb
Time spent: 26m 47s

Based on that, the recommended way is to run using the default ‘bigode’ source and if a game is not found, just run the scraper again in ‘append’ mode (to scan only the missing games) using ‘adb’ as source.

A huge thanks for AntoPISA creator of Progetto Snaps for the images and tons of mame resources.

Also, a huge thanks to Motoschifo creator of Arcade Database for the awesome arcade database website.

Install

Install using pip:

pip install mamescraper

or

Download and set executable permission on the script file:

chmod +x mamescraper.py

or

Download and run using the python interpreter:

python mamescraper.py

Usage

Usage: mamescraper [options]

scrap mame games information and images from 'mame.bigode.net' or
'adb.arcadeitalia.net'

Options:
--version       show program's version number and exit
-h, --help      show this help message and exit
-a, --append    scrap only missing roms from output file and append it to
                the file (default: disabled)
-d ROMS_DIR     directory containing the games (default: current directory)
-f FORMAT       file format of the games: 'zip' or '7z' (default: zip)
-i IMAGES       images type: 'mixed', 'title' or 'flyer' - mixed will
                download a flyer and fallback to title if a flyer is not
                found (default: mixed)
-o OUTPUT_FILE  the xml file that will be created (default: gamelist.xml)
-s SOURCE       information and images source: 'bigode' or 'adb' (default:
                bigode)
-w WORKERS      number of workers threads to use (default: 5)

Examples

Simplest use case is to run on the mame games directory itself:

$ cd my_games_dir
$ mamescraper

Alternatively, you can pass the directory to the scraper:

$ mamescraper -d path_to_games_dir

Scrap only missing games in the existing ‘gamelist.xml’ file:

$ mamescraper -a

It is useful for scrap on both sources if a game is not found. Just run the scraper a second time with append enable and a different source:

$ mamescraper
$ mamescraper -a -s adb

If you have games in mixed formats, the following will run the first time scraping games in ‘zip’ format (default) and the second time appending the missing games in ‘7z’ format:

$ mamescraper
$ mamescraper -a -f 7z

Run with 10 workers downloading only titles images:

$ mamescraper -i title -w 10

Notes

• Works on Python 2

• Tested on Linux and Windows, but should work on all platforms

• Uses only Python standard library for maximum compatibility