sselph
Poor quality MAME snaps/titles
Hi! I've found an interesting (well..) issue - the www.mamedb.com snaps and titles that are currently pulled by the scraper are in quite bad quality, despite being large pngs. Eg:
That file is 68KB, but if you open it in an image view and zoom in you can see it's compressed and horrible, despite being a low res, low colour arcade game screenshot, which should be perfect quality in png. This is a problem in some ES themes which show large screenshots (eg, Pixel)
I did some digging, and it seems that mamedb use images sourced from 'CrashTest'. Their images are hosted here: titles: http://www.emu-france.com/utilitaires/17-mame-support-files/264-crashtest-art-packs/2806-crashtest-shots-titles/ snaps: http://www.emu-france.com/utilitaires/17-mame-support-files/264-crashtest-art-packs/2805-crashtest-shots-snap/ (there are some other packs available here but not sure if they're relevant: http://www.emu-france.com/utilitaires/17-mame-support-files/264-crashtest-art-packs/)
If you download these packs, the same screenshots are full quality, but a fraction of the file size! Eg:
That file is perfect quality yet 16KB compared to the horrible one at 68KB! If you compare them side-by-side when zoomed it's a huge difference.
I've contacted the mamedb guy through the contact form on the site to see if he can refresh the images, which would solve the problem, but thought I'd document it here whilst it's in memory. Since these packs are quite small (about 60MB each), it might also be possible to host them elsewhere (this repo?) and bypass mamedb entirely?
Cool if he improves his images that would be great, I don't want to host images myself. I've also been contacted by the author of another database but I've been lazy and not actually written the code to add it. There were a few requests that made it a little more difficult to add than just pulling down a web page.
