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Whatscheiser's Achievements
16-Bit Artificial Intelligence (4/7)
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Version 1.0.0
26 downloads
Hello, This is box art I have done for my own selection of SEGA CD games. There are 20 total that includes box-front, box-spine, and box-back images. The games are as follows... Batman Returns Demolition Man Earthworm Jim Ecco The Dolphin Ecco The Dolphin The Tides of Time Final Fight Formula One Beyond the Limit Loadstar Lords of Thunder Mortal Kombat NHL '94 Pitfall the Myan Adventure Road Rash SEGA Classics Arcade Collection (5 in 1) Sewer Shark Silpheed Snatcher Sonic CD Soul Star The Terminator Most of these box-front and back images are sourced from SEGA Retro scans that have been cleaned up and upscaled with Topaz-AI. After running them through that process I then scale them back down closer to their original scanned resolution and do any necessary re-touch work to clean them up to where they look acceptable to my eye. For example with the Earthworm Jim cover art, the text did not fare well at all with the AI upscale process. So I tracked down the font (or as close as I could approximate) and re-did all of the descriptions and legalese for the back of the box. The Spines and the blue "candy cane" art was redrawn by me using a Sega Retro Scan as a pattern guide. The SEGA CD logo is from Dan Patrick's platform logo pack. A lot of publisher logos and what have you's are pulled from PNGs found online and re-integrated into the original artwork to clean things up. A couple of the artworks (Loadstar, SEGA Classics, and the box back artwork for Formula One) contains some bits augmented by or straight up ripped out of artwork done for The Cover Project by Vt102. -
Hello, I'm currently working on updating my media art for my Sega CD collection and I am noticing that the long jewel case model seems to distort any images I'm creating for the Sega CD. I'm basing the resolutions off of what I'm finding from original scans at SegaRetro.org ...It's only very slightly noticeable sometimes on front and back covers, but the spines are super squished. It became a little extra apparent recently when cleaning up the cover art for NHL '94. That spine contains a round NHL Official Product seal and, yeah its not round when viewed on that spine. It's become quite an oval. I've not had this issue with the DVD cover or box models. Just the long jewel cases. Resolution size for my spine is 208x2360 Which again, lines up pretty well with scanned artwork that I have from the original packaging. So I don't think I am producing an image that ratio wise would be something completely unexpected for the model to deal with. I'm wondering if there is a certain resolution size I need to be shooting for, or could it be possible to get that model to conform to the size of the image it is displaying? Which I believe is how the 3D boxes are setup. Thanks.
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Just to chime in on this... because I'm glad I put two and two together before I relaunched the application and gave auto-import a chance to do its thing. I was editing one of my platforms and had need to change the file name of an .lnk file. I had LaunchBox open at the time so it prompted me with something like "A change was made in one of your game folders. Would you like LaunchBox to autoupdate ROM changes for you?" Which I'll admit did pique my interest so I clicked "Yes"... and then remembered the new feature and the "opt in" nature of it for existing installs. I checked, and sure enough the Auto-Import feature was enabled through that dialogue. To me there isn't enough there indicating what a user is opting in to. It asked if I wanted it to monitor existing folders and update changes I make, which actually would be pretty cool. What it doesn't say is that it may also add things I didn't intend or create more game folders for systems I don't actually have. The prompt given to a user that isn't following all of the updates doesn't really paint the entire picture of what they are agreeing to. Anyway, I didn't have any issues with it. Just wanted to point out how I could see it being an issue for folks who do not want the feature. I get pretty deep into the weeds customizing my libraries. The last thing I want is automation making changes I didn't intend to make.
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TV Series Scraper
Whatscheiser replied to skizzosjt's topic in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)
Ah that makes a lot of sense. Thanks again for taking a close look at these issues and uploading the revised script! I'll keep tinkering with it and let you know if I find anything else of interest. I'm looking forward to checking out v2.0 as well! -
TV Series Scraper
Whatscheiser replied to skizzosjt's topic in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)
Thanks for letting me know. I still had an issue scraping info for Season 1 of Miami Vice when I was using https://thetvdb.com/series/miami-vice/allseasons/official I didn't get one match which left me scratching my head again... However, I swapped out and tried using https://thetvdb.com/series/miami-vice/allseasons/dvd and all of the sudden, matched every single episode, brought in poster art and proper gameplay shots as well. What's odd is that aside from the data for both of these residing at different URLs, so far as I can tell, its all the same data in terms of episode order, title and description. The DVD order even still has the air date information. Another one for the "weird" category. I appreciate you taking another look into those issues with Modern Marvels. Your script helped me get the bulk of the episodes I have imported at any rate. It's not a deal breaker for me If I have to do some copy/paste work on the final few seasons, but it would be awesome to solve it. I've got plenty of patience for it, I just appreciate you taking the time to work on the script and share it. Like I said before, I'm just happy to be a help if I can be. Just let me know what I can do. Thanks! -
TV Series Scraper
Whatscheiser replied to skizzosjt's topic in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)
1. I'll see what I can do about providing an example. TVDB seems to be having issues of its own tonight. Nothing but a lot of 502 errors on several different browsers. At any rate I didn't really get the error message I spoke of in my previous post any longer. I wish I could be of more use for diagnosing the issue but I don't have much aside from... it worked for 12 or so seasons, and then it didn't. Which I know is not super helpful information. ...What I can say is the scraper runs. I can see it making progress on scanning the 400 plus some odd entries, but it just will not match my episodes regardless of how I name them. I can make the file name a 1:1 match and it just seems to blow right past it. I feel like a bit of a nerd here but the show I am currently working on is Modern Marvels from the old History Channel. Anyway, I had also used your script to pull info in for Andor, and Band of Brothers with no issue. Both of those were one season series and I wanted to do a larger show so, I tackled my largest one, which is Modern Marvels. Everything pulled good until about the last two episodes of Season 11. For whatever reason it just wouldn't grab them. So I did the shoulder shrug and moved onto season 12... then none of those matched either, same with season 13, 14, and 15. Then I just stopped trying it. The URL I was entering in every case of error is this one: https://thetvdb.com/series/modern-marvels/allseasons/official An example episode it wouldn't grab would be anything from the mentioned seasons, but I'll throw out one: S12E51 Coffee Now I know the ideal convention for naming that you laid out would be "Modern Marvels S12E51 Coffee" I tried that when my normal naming convention stopped working but it didn't make a difference, unfortunately. To be clear... I did try it with a new series just to make this post. I imported the first season of Miami Vice. Did not match a single episode for the first season (only tried the first season). I really wish I could account for why. All I can really keep saying here is that the script worked great, and then it didn't work. I just can't seem to account for it. 3. S06E05 The Police Car; S06E06 Plastics - two examples from the URL I gave above. The scraper will make a release date entry of "H2" if you request it pull in info for those episodes. The Modern Marvels TVDB is kind of all over the place. It's pretty widely known that outside of show names and descriptions, its not super accurate. So missing air dates doesn't really surprise me. ...Oddly enough I think the most accurate info I have found for the show is actually on RottenTomatoes. For the last point, I'd definitely test out a new version of the script. I have plenty more shows to pull and anything I can do that helps contribute to better tools I'm more than happy to do. -
TV Series Scraper
Whatscheiser replied to skizzosjt's topic in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)
Hello, I've really been enjoying having this on hand to assist with adding data to my TV Show entries. Suddenly having an issue with the script today though. I do everything as I had been doing, but when I hit the button to scrape for an episode the script times out then shows an error message asking if I'd like to close or continue... ...and I was just about to do this again so I could screen shot the error message and post it here. When I did, the script suddenly worked. Odd since I failed out the three times prior. I suppose never mind. I guess I'll see if it happens again. (EDIT:: It seems like its just a timeout with contacting TVDB. The show I'm currently scraping has north of 400 episodes. It might just be taking to long to look through all of that data and so its throwing an error. I don't think anything is actually broken). ::EDIT 2:: Eh, yeah for some reason it just doesn't match at all now. Can't really put together why. Just all of the sudden in the middle of season 12 I stopped getting any matches from TVDB for this show. Haven't done anything different than the prior seasons. Weird, man. --------------------------------------------------------------- While I'm here though I do have a couple other issues to bring up. When scraping TVDB and adding information to LaunchBox's XML files I'm finding I'll always have an issue if the title of an episode or the notes contain "&" - The XML format interprets it as some type of incomplete entry. LaunchBox will report a corruption error when starting up. Luckily it also reports the file and what line and position the error is at so its a pretty trivial thing to just manually edit out the mistake, but it does happen fairly frequently. The other issue I've noticed is with TVDB's formatting for release date of an episode and the network it aired on. Every so often the air date is not listed. When this happens the script will sometimes mistakenly enter the network call sign where the XML file expects the release date. LaunchBox will then interpret the field to have invalid data at start up and again will report that the fil is corrupted. And again, its easily fixed with a manual edit. Just thought those might be worth mentioning. -
launchbox The Ultimate Magazine Experience
Whatscheiser replied to a topic in Collections and Builds
Man that PDF flip software is pretty pricey. There is also CDisplayEx. http://www.cdisplayex.com/desktop/ It's not as flashy, but its easy to use, can display magazines with a similar view and its free. Aside from that I really dig this idea. I didn't need another thing to collect but now I kind of want to do this. lol -
Website didn't want to let me leave a review yesterday. Looks like today I can. It's just like I said in my comment, this works great for pulling in all of the tedious metadata associated with importing TV into LaunchBox and it MASSIVELY speeds up the process. I'm about to go on a bit of a marathon run of importing shows now that I have this tool to use. I really appreciate this being shared with the community and I'm excited to see other folks taking an interest in hosting other media within LaunchBox/BigBox.
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Movie Scraper (Reboot 2023)
Whatscheiser reviewed JoeViking245's file in Third-party Apps and Plugins
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You are my hero right now, man. This is great! I just got done scraping two shows and this does all of the heavy lifting perfectly. One side note and I apologize if you covered it, but I do have autohotkey on this machine already. Issue was I'm running AHK V2 which didn't want to play friendly with your script. I grabbed AHK V1 to run it and it all worked flawlessly. Only mentioning it in case anyone else has a minute or two of head scratching there. I love this though. Thanks!
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This looks great, but I'm not understanding how you got the views you showcase here with it. I've downloaded and installed this on the latest beta build but I don't really see how I can get rid of the left side menu and make it collapsible as the one in the first picture... the problem exists for me with all of the examples pictured here. I'm not really understanding what I'm missing. I assume there must be a settings menu somewhere that I'm overlooking? ::EDIT:: Alright, I literally figured it out the second I hit the post button. I found the show/hide menu. I think I'm there now. Looks great, thanks!
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Movie Scraper Plugin [Broken]
Whatscheiser replied to slipsystem's topic in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)
I thought I might try and look at the .pdb file included in the download... but I can't seem to find a tool that can read it correctly. If the author happens across this and wants to let us know what he uses to edit and create the files I'd be willing to take a crack at it. -
Version 1.0.0
211 downloads
In my media collection I keep movies and games side by side. Presenting that can be a bit of a hassle given different form factors for video game boxes. I find stuff like SEGA Genesis, SEGA CD, and NES all present pretty well in terms of image aspect ratio when compared to other media such as movies and tv shows... However things like SNES, N64 or in this case, Sony Playstation 1 tend to stick out a bit and break up the over all presentation. (or I'm just a bit ridiculous which is entirely possible). At any rate sites like https://www.thecoverproject.net/ can be a great resource given many of their covers look to standardize games to something like a DVD case or universal game case. Using this website almost exclusively is how I got artwork for my SNES and N64 games. Unfortunately the PS1 titles were not as well represented. This collection I've put together tries to re-imagine 76 games from the Playstation 1 as if the long box format is what was used by Sony exclusively. So I've labeled this as "Whatscheiser's PS1 Cover Artwork" but honestly this thing is all over the place. Some are original cover art that have been painstakingly altered by me taking time to resize assets and do a bit of work to paint things into perspective. Some of these covers have some reused assets of versions found on the cover project. Some of these have been fed through AI upscalers such as https://letsenhance.io/. Some that were a bit too challenging for me to extend were even fed to DALL-E for some image extensions... which didn't work out too badly. (Mainly the Tony Hawk game covers as well as Quake II.) The initial template I put together made use of the Platform logos released to the community by Dan Patrick. All of these box arts should line up precisely in terms of logo placement and over all dimensions. I've been turning out several of these a day over the last couple of months. So the burnout is here. I don't have plans to add many more titles if any. It'll kind of depend on if I feel like expanding my own collection. I'll make an effort to get these onto the LaunchBox games db as well. Hopefully some others can get some use out of these. Thanks! -
Launchbox connects to NAS without being asked to.
Whatscheiser replied to Whatscheiser's topic in Troubleshooting
Eh, well. I ended up using shortcuts. I used the xcopy command in windows to mirror the folder structure I had on the file server. Shortcuts went into those folders and Notepad++ took care of swapping out file extensions and the leading bit of the directory structure. No more spinning up the NAS to just browse around. I saved a backup of an unedited version of the platform's xml file if I need to swap it back in for some unknown reason. ...creating the shortcuts sucked. Smooth process otherwise.