Script to generate Emulation Station xml (MAME/FBA/consoles)

[cacophony555]

I wrote a script to generate the Emulation Station xml, and thought others might be interested. The only alternative I've found is ES-scraper, which can take multiple days to run if you have thousands of roms. The big advantage of my script is that it runs entirely offline within a couple seconds.

From the readme:
mameGenXml.pl is a perl script that will create the xml for Emulation Station, attempting to populate real game names in place of the often cryptic mame/fba filenames. It will also add references to image files if it finds them in the rom directory. It runs entirely offline which makes it fast. You can use it for console roms as well.

Optional: If you'd like images, I'd suggest using the EmuMovies DSU, which is a free Windows program that will automatically fetch images for your roms within a couple minutes (http://emumovies.com/forums/index.php/f ... ovies-dsu/). Just make sure to copy the downloaded images to the appropriate rom directory on your Pi before running mameGenXml.pl

mameGenXml is available here with instructions if anybody would like to use it:
http://bobtailed-primes.000webhostapp.com/mame/

(edit: updated location)

[ewzzy]

This is incredible! Using this in conjunction with "Fuzzy Rename" and a downloaded screenshot pack makes for a perfectly put together Emulation Station.

There hasn't been a lot of attention here, but this script really deserves it!

Could you add support for final Burn Alpha? It looks like it just needs the names added to the association_data file, but I can't find a resources with the names to integrate it.

It looks like replacing "zip" with "nes" (or any other extension) will create a gamelist.txt associating nes and images based on their file names which works for well named roms on non-arcade systems. The work I was doing to get those results was insane compared to how easy this is.

Thanks!

[cacophony555]

Thanks for the feedback! It's great to hear that you found it useful.

I actually already have two modified versions (one for Final Burn Alpha and one for consoles where I've been manually modifying a couple strings before running). I figured the best thing would be to integrate them all into a single script, but I just haven't put in the effort yet. But as you speculate they are almost identical though the FBA one utilizes a different association file with a slightly different format. I could probably merge the two association files, but I wasn't sure about name conflicts.

I'll try to get these variations up on the website soon...

[cacophony555]

Ask and you shall receive!

I just updated the page with a new version that supports mame, fba, and consoles. You need to pass some parameters now to set the mode (mame, fba, or console) and the file extension (zip, nes, etc). All of this is described in the updated README.txt.

Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

[ewzzy]

It worked fantastically! My FBA roms are now all labeled with screenshots and and the script easily handled all of the consoles I threw out of it. Passing the correct arguments was a bit of a pain, but that's mostly because I'm using a tiny handheld keyboard. I'd love to see this integrated into the Retropie-Setup script as an alternative to running ES-Scraper.

[cacophony555]

@ewzzy, thanks for the followup and glad to hear it worked for you!

[wgtspook]

Can you repost mameGenXml. The link appears to be broken. Thank you.

[cacophony555]

Can you repost mameGenXml. The link appears to be broken. Thank you.

Sure, here's a new location:
http://bobtailed-primes.000webhostapp.com/mame/

Hope it proves useful!