[Other] Alternative metadata sources

[pbuyle]

If you are add more sources for game metadata:

• https://thegamesdb.net
• https://www.screenscraper.fr
• http://adb.arcadeitalia.net

[DebugDax]

If you are add more sources for game metadata:

* https://thegamesdb.net

* https://www.screenscraper.fr

* http://adb.arcadeitalia.net

Zurdi, I see you marked this as help wanted. I went and checked out each site for you to see what I could find out about their API's.

• thegamesdb: https://forums.thegamesdb.net/viewtopic.php?t=836
  Seems to not hand out keys for standard users anymore, may not be usable.

End users should not be requesting keys on this forum, as legacy keys are no longer directly supported.

--

• screenscraper: https://www.screenscraper.fr/webapi2.php?alpha=0&numpage=0
  Without paying for a premium account, you can only use 1 Thread which means 1 request a time, no concurrent. There is also an hourly/daily quota depending on how much you pay for your account. They don't reveal the limit publicly it seems as it's returned as part of the API calls. Might be an issue if people have full romsets ( and also don't want to pay for an API ).

The "Quota" information is returned in the user data so that it can be easily integrated and managed directly by the scrape software.

--

• arcadeitalia: http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/download.php
  They don't seem to have an API, instead you have to download their database and parse it yourself locally.

[crispybegs]

this morning I was trying to match a rom called 'Yoshi's Universal Gravitation' which is the european name for something that's called 'Yoshi Topsy-Turvy' in the US.

RomM was giving a 'no results found' message whgen it searched IGDB, and I'm guessing that's because IGDB either exclusively or in many cases only sees the US as the standard, which is what we see when searching manually:

Once I changed the filename to 'Yoshi Topsy-Turvy' RomM immediately found the match and completed the metadata.

In complete reverse, screenscraper.fr finds 'Yoshi's Universal Gravitation' but doesn't find 'Yoshi Topsy-Turvy'

I wonder if there actually exists a source that can handle multi-region releases / naming because there'll be a lot of manual matching like this that needs doing if there isn't.

[zurdi15]

This can be solved with IGDB itself, but needs an extra feature implementation that searchs every alternative name of one game. If you look at the IGDB API or the web page, you can see this section:

This will be implemented in the near future. Just opened the issue for it #75

[crispybegs]

ah nice, i couldn't find it on IGDB via a normal manual search

[zurdi15]

Yeah my guess is that the IGDB web search only searches for main title but not alternatives.

For now you could use the matching name as filename and put the european one as a tag if you want to remain it and search for it.

In the next release you can search by tag, not only by name

something like: Yoshi Topsy-Turvy (Yoshi's Universal Gravitation).gba

[crispybegs]

any idea why this refuses to match? I've tried 'Einhänder' / 'Einhander' but nothing is found

[crispybegs]

thanks to the new seach by ID number, that einhander problem was fixed, thanks @zurdi15!

[zurdi15]

I am closing this because I have no plans for support more metadata sources for the moment.

[nomandera]

#821 (comment)

Cross linking as landing here seems a conclusive no when it seems that may not necessarily still be the case.

[dd900]

thegamesdb.net now has a new API request system and it is really easy to get a key. They respond really fast too. Aside from the API you can download their entire database in JSON format (https://cdn.thegamesdb.net/json/database-latest.json). The only downside to the json file is that Genres, Publishers, Developers, etc. are all listed as lists of integers. You have to make a few API calls to get the rest of the data and their corresponding IDs.

https://api.thegamesdb.net/v1/Genres?apikey=
https://api.thegamesdb.net/v1/Developers?apikey=
https://api.thegamesdb.net/v1/Publishers?apikey=
https://api.thegamesdb.net/v1/Countries?apikey=
https://api.thegamesdb.net/v1/Regions?apikey=

These files don't need to be updated very often as the data doesn't change often