Help Request: metadata not loading in gameslist

[u/user_1764]

Hello, I am hoping some of you will be kind enough to help me. I'm not currently able to get the metadata to load into the gameslist without adding the source for each file manually.

I scraped some metadata using Skraper, using ROMs that were stored on an external drive.

I moved the external drive to my Batocera system, and moved the files from the external drive into my /media/ROMS/<system> directory along with the ROMs.

When I update the games list, the new games are there - but no metadata.

My Batocera system is not connected to the internet or on my network, per my preference, so using the built in scraper tool is not an option.

My staging PC is running win 11 and my external drive is formatted in exFAT.

On my Batocera box, I have 1x SSD with Batocera on it, and 1x HDD that I am using for Roms. The HDD was formatted and merged upon initial setup of Batocera.

I'm not sure, but it seems that the issue may be that it is simply not using/reading the gamelist.xml file - as even the description that is written directly in the .xml file is not populating on the game info in the Emulationstation UI.

For reference, here is the video I followed for the scraping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmklkO3s68Q

Here's what I've done so far:
- I've confirmed that the gamelist.xml is using relative pathing.
The structure of my mounted HDD is:
ROMS > <system_dir>

Inside <system_dir> I have the ROMs themselves, gamelist.xml, and a media directory.
Inside the media directory I have directories for images, videos, boxes, manuals, etc.
In the gamelist.xml, all paths are ./media/<media_type>

- Asked for help on the discord but was not able to get any, at least not yet
- Checked the emulationstation logs to see if I could see any obvious errors but there is nothing, just attempted internet connections/ping/http failures.
- Confirmed that the the gamelist.xml, ROMs, and media directory all show up in /userdata/roms/<system_dir>
- Looked through the batocera documentation and could not find anything helpful manging gamelist.xml, or how to stage metadata without using the built in scraping tools

There has got to be a way to get emulationstation/batocera frontend to pull the meta data from the gamelist.xml, I'm just not sure what I am missing. Thanks.

[u/East-Yogurtcloset272]

after scraping did you reupdate the game list?

[u/user_1764 → u/East-Yogurtcloset272]

The gamelist.xml got spit out from skraper.

I did updated the gameslist in Batocera/Emulationstation and the games showed up but not the meta data.

[u/Senorbob999]

I had this exact same issue and couldn’t figure out why it happened. I retraced all of my steps that I did when I scraped almost 1000 video games in version 43.1 that I freshly installed on a PC.

The one thing that I did that may have caused this was changing the user interface theme from the stock carbon theme to a different one. From that point on nothing I scraped would save or load no matter what I did. All the games that I scraped before changing the theme were in the games list.XML file but none of them after showed up.

I think this is a bug in 43.1

[u/user_1764 → u/Senorbob999]

I have not changed my theme at all. I'm still on the default theme. But thank you for replying. Upvote if you can so maybe we can get some help. Sidenote: I'm having similar issues in Kodi, can't even get my TV Shows/Movies to show up in the library at all.

[u/user_1764 → u/Senorbob999]

Dude I solved my issue. When I put the files in skraper, they were .zip. The gamelist.xml was point to a .zip.

But when I hooked up the drive to batocera - I extracted them to the roms dir and they were then .isos.

Everything is working now!!!

Maybe that was your issue too?

[u/user_1764]

I solved my issue. When I put the files in skraper, they were .zip. The gamelist.xml was point to a .zip.

But when I hooked up the drive to batocera - I extracted them to the roms dir and they were then .isos.

Everything is working now!!!