Arcade core metadata and artwork not displaying despite valid gamelist.xml and images.

[zaparoo-automation-bot]

Issue created from Discord

Source: Zaparoo / #development

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Reported Message

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Reporter - 2026-06-07 20:37 UTC

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Context (previous messages)

Reporter - 2026-06-07 10:07 UTC

I've been playing with the frontend for a few updates (beta and releases), currently on the 1.0.3. I haven't been able to get it to show the metadata/artwork for the arcade cores. My gamelist.xml created by Skraper looks reasonable to my eye, and the images are all in-place, but my arcade folder just lists the games and full titles, but no year/genre/players etc. or the image. Any pointers?

User B - 2026-06-07 11:17 UTC

will put something up in a minute you can try

Reporter - 2026-06-07 11:40 UTC

Will report back in like an hour when it's finished re-scraping all the systems 🙂 Thanks.

Reporter - 2026-06-07 15:59 UTC

Still only about halfway through re-scraping. However, a lot of the systems are behaving a lot better in terms of having metadata I would expect, and the whole thing is a lot more responsive in terms of loading the metadata and images. Well done! Will report back on Arcade when it's done. Neogeo is the other pain point - only rendering the Darksoft folders+xml as the folder/set names like "2020bb". I think I saw a ticket on github about that before.

Reporter - 2026-06-07 20:36 UTC

No luck here still. Worth me raising a ticket on github? I turned on the logging and got the attached.

Attachments

[ppriest]

So this was user error.
I had pointed Skraper at the '/games' dir and told it to do it's thing, assuming that a gamelist.xml and images in the mame folder would do it for Arcade.
However, unlike most systems with collections of media (rom zips, chd, iso), Zaparoo Core actually wants to drive it off of the .mra files in '/_Arcade', and the path is relative to that (and the images reportedly live there too).

If ES gamelist.xml is going to continue to be the preferred format for metadata scraping, then should there be a FAQ or guide systems with special cases like this? A guide to configuring Skraper to author the files?Maybe I missed it.

What other cases are there? AmigaVision games.txt and demos.txt, is there a known way to get Skraper to parse those?

Thanks.

[wizzomafizzo]

@ppriest sorry I only just saw this. Not yet but I'll leave this open until it's working