Artwork and Metadata

Artwork & Metadata

Emutastic fills in each game's box art, title, developer, publisher, genre, year, and description automatically. Two sources feed this, and which one is primary depends on whether you've signed into ScreenScraper in Preferences → Snaps.

Default — OpenVGDB (no account needed)

With no account and no setup, Emutastic identifies your games against OpenVGDB, a community game database shipped inside the app as a local SQLite file (Assets\openvgdb.sqlite). It matches by ROM hash first, then by filename — so results are best with ROMs named close to the No-Intro / Redump conventions.

Box art comes from the libretro thumbnail server, with OpenVGDB's own cover-art URLs as a secondary image source when libretro has nothing for a title.

Note

"Offline" only goes so far. The metadata match against OpenVGDB is local and uses no network. But box art is always fetched over the internet (from the libretro server or a cover-art CDN), so you still need a connection to download artwork — even without a ScreenScraper account.

OpenVGDB's coverage skews toward cartridge-era consoles; disc-era and post-2010 systems can be thin or missing.

Primary when logged in — ScreenScraper

Sign into ScreenScraper and it becomes the primary source, with OpenVGDB demoted to the backup that fills whatever ScreenScraper misses. ScreenScraper is community-edited and region-aware, with fuller, more accurate coverage across far more systems — and it unlocks two things OpenVGDB can't provide:

• 3D box art — the angled boxed-cover renders used in the shelf view.
• Game manuals — original PDF manuals, downloaded and read in the built-in viewer.

ScreenScraper enforces a per-day request quota tied to your account. If you hit it mid-refresh, Emutastic automatically falls back to OpenVGDB for the remainder of the run and notes the switch in the status bar.

At a glance

	No ScreenScraper account	Signed into ScreenScraper
Primary metadata	OpenVGDB (built-in local DB)	ScreenScraper
Backup metadata	cleaned filename	OpenVGDB, then cleaned filename
Box art	libretro thumbnails → OpenVGDB covers	ScreenScraper → libretro → OpenVGDB
3D box art	—	✓
Game manuals	—	✓
Internet required	Yes — to download art	Yes

Where it's stored

Downloaded art is cached locally under your data folder's Artwork\ directory (organized by console), and metadata text is written into the library database. Nothing is re-fetched once cached unless you trigger a refresh. See the Privacy Policy for the exact outbound connections involved.