A powerful and versatile yet easy to use game scraper written in C++ for use with multiple frontends running on a Linux system (macOS and Windows too, but not officially supported). It scrapes and caches various game resources from various scraping sources, including media such as screenshot, cover and video. It then gives you the option to generate a game list and artwork for the chosen frontend by combining all of the cached resources.

All Skyscraper features are well-documented and there's also a F.A.Q. If you still have questions after reading the documentation, please consider asking them on the RetroPie subreddit or in the official RetroPie forums. The Issues page here on Github is for bug reports and feature requests only. Thanks!

Pull Requests are not currently accepted. Due to wanting to pursue other projects after having worked on Skyscraper for 3 years, I am currently only fixing scraper-breaking bugs in Skyscraper. For any functionality beyond what is already in place, feel free to fork Skyscraper and fit it to your needs. I am no longer actively considering or commenting user feature requests or pull requests. When / if this changes, this text will be updated.

Check the full list of platforms here.

Skyscraper supports a variety of different scraping sources called scraping modules. Use these to gather game data into the Skyscraper resource cache. Check the full list of scraping modules here and read more about the resource cache here.

• EmulationStation
• AttractMode
• Pegasus

Follow the steps below to install the latest version of Skyscraper. Lines beginning with $ signifies a command you need run in a terminal on the machine you wish to install it on.

NOTE! If you are using the RetroPie distribution, you have the option to install Skyscraper directly from the RetroPie-Setup script (you need to update the script before installing it!). Read more about all of that here. If not, read on.

Skyscraper needs Qt5.3 or later to compile. For a Retropie, Ubuntu or other Debian derived distro, you can install Qt5 using the following commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install build-essential qt5-default

You might be asked for your sudo password. On RetroPie the default password is raspberry. To install Qt5 on other Linux distributions, please refer to their documentation.

NOTE! Ubuntu 21.04 hasn't added the qt5-default metapackage yet. For this version you will have to do sudo apt install build-essential qtbase5-dev qt5-qmake qtbase5-dev-tools which installs the same as the above command.

Skyscraper works perfectly on macOS as well but is not officially supported as I don't own a Mac. But with the help of HoraceAndTheSpider and abritinthebay here's the commands needed to install the Qt5 and other prerequisites:

$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
$ brew install gnu-tar --with-default-names
$ brew install wget
$ brew install qt5
$ brew link qt5 --force

If that went well, proceed to the default installation instructions below. It should work and give you a working installation of Skyscraper.

NOTE 1! User 'davidmgrantham' reports that the --with-default-names above might be deprecated for some macOS installations. If you remove it, you also need to download the scripts/install and edit the tar commands to be gtar before running it.

NOTE 2! User 'trvrplk' reports numerous issues on MacOS 11.2+. Check here for potential fixes.

When you've installed the prerequisites as described above, you can install Skyscraper by typing in the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/denisidoro/skyscraper
$ cd skyscraper
$ ./scripts/install

The last command run the latest update script from Github. During the installation you might be asked for your sudo password. On RetroPie the default password is raspberry.

When the script has completed you are ready to run Skyscraper!

From Skyscraper 2.3.2 and newer you can update to the latest version simply by running the following commands:

$ cd
$ cd skysource
$ ./scripts/install

You might be asked for your sudo password during the update. On RetroPie the default password is raspberry. If your version is older than 2.3.2 (check with --help) you need to follow the installation instructions instead.

If you've installed Skyscraper using the instructions in this readme, you can uninstall it using the following commands:

$ cd
$ cd skysource
$ sudo make uninstall
$ cd
$ rm -Rf skysource
$ rm -Rf .skyscraper

You might be asked for your sudo password during the processs. On RetroPie the default password is raspberry.

Windows is not officially supported at this time! But I do semi-regularly compile and release an unsupported Windows 64-bit version that works just fine. Be sure to read the included README from the downloaded file before using it! And just to be clear: You are on your own if you use this version - please don't ask me questions about it. Get the Windows version here.

IMPORTANT!!! In order for Skyscraper to work properly, it is necessary to quit your frontend before running it! If you're running EmulationStation, you can quit it by pressing F4.

Remember, you can completely customize the artwork Skyscraper exports. Check out the documentation here. If you just want to use the default (pretty cool looking) artwork Skyscraper provides, read on.

For first-time users I recommend reading the short and to-the-point use case. Please read it and get back here when you got the gist of it.

Skyscraper is a command line tool, and has many, many options for you to fiddle around with. I recommend taking a look at all of them to familiarize yourself with the possibilites:

$ Skyscraper --help
$ Skyscraper --flags help
$ Skyscraper --cache help

This will give you a description of everything Skyscraper can do if you feel adventurous! For a thorough description of all available options, check here.

The most important ones are probably:

• -p <PLATFORM>
• -s <SCRAPING MODULE>
• -u <USER:PASS> or -u <KEY>
• --cache refresh
• --flags videos

If you have your roms in a non-default location (default for RetroPie users is /home/<USER>/RetroPie/roms/<PLATFORM>) or wish to export the game list or artwork to non-default locations, you will also need these:

• -i <PATH>
• -g <PATH>
• -o <PATH>

For almost any command line option, consider setting them in the /home/USER/.skyscraper/config.ini file as described here. This will make the options permanent so you don't need to type them in all the time.

Skyscraper offers several ways of gathering data for a subset of roms. If you just want to scrape the roms that have no data in the cache whatsoever, you can do so with the --onlymissing command-line option. You can also check out the --startat FILENAME and --endat FILENAME options. If you just want to gather data for a couple of roms you can simply add the filename(s) to the end of the command-line (eg. Skyscraper -p amiga -s openretro "/path/to/rom name 1.lha" "/path/to/rom name 2.lha"). And probably the most advanced (and quite handy) way to gather data for a subset of roms is to make use of the --cache report:missing=RESOURCE option. This can generate a report containing the filenames that are missing a certain resource. You can then feed the report back into Skyscraper with the --fromfile REPORTFILE afterwards. Skyscraper will then only scrape the files contained in the report.

A lesser known, but extremely useful, feature of Skyscraper is to add your desired config variables to /home/USER/.skyscraper/config.ini. Any options set in this file will be used by default by Skyscraper. So if you always use, for example, -i <SOME FOLDER> on command line, you can set the matching option inputFolder="<SOME FOLDER>" in the config.

For a full description of all availabe config options, check here.

One of Skyscraper's most powerful features is the resource cache. It's important to understand how this works in order to use Skyscraper to its full potential. Read more about it here.

I addition to allowing scraping from locally cached resources, Skyscraper also allows you to import your own data into the resource cache with the -s import scraping module. You can also edit existing resources in the cache or add individual user resources with the --cache edit command. Lastly, you also have the option of importing existing EmulationStation game list data into the Skyscraper resource cache if you need it. You can do this with the -s esgamelist scraping module.

To read more about any of the features described above, please check out all of the documentation here.

Check the full artwork documentation here

Release notes for older releases can be found here.