RetroArch… any way to get the *correct* box art?

[Room 34]

Hi all… if you've been around here for ages you may remember me, but I haven't been posting much. I'm having another wave of nostalgia for Atari 2600. (And I'm freaking out a bit, because I originally came around here when it had been 20 years since I got my Atari 2600… and now it's been 20 years since I joined the AtariAge forums!)

 

Anyway… I haven't been keeping up that much with developments in emulation, but now I'm working on putting together a nice setup to play old games on my new MacBook Pro using RetroArch.

 

I like how RetroArch takes a lot of the work out of hunting down everything (other than the actual ROMs, of course!) but I am finding it extremely irritating how it pulls in some random fake Atari 2600 box art instead of scans of the real original art. I think the attached image says it all.

 

I'm wondering if anyone here has any ideas about ways to get the real box art. I know it exists online, because it's right on this site! But I don't want to spend ages manually updating the files, especially since I'm finding a few aspects of RetroArch's configuration tools a bit inscrutable.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Jetboot Jack]

RetroArch pulls it's box art from here - https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/libretro-thumbnails

 

That's where the errors are - it gets poor quality data because those are the files uploaded there sadly.

 

You have two options - correct the source or add your own manually (or live with the wonky scraped material).

 

Openemu gets better box art than RetroArch if you are a Mac only retro gamer (although the OpenEmu 2600 core is ANCIENT and pretty weak)...

 

         sTeVE

[MrMaddog]

I often get those faux silver box art from Launch Box front end as well...yes even for non Atari games as well!

 

They would be best catergorized as Fanart, though it still bugs me they still considered as "original" box art...

[Jetboot Jack]

Launchbox AstroBlast 2600 has the correct art work in it's database...

 

sTeVE

[Jetboot Jack]

On 5/24/2022 at 7:44 PM, MrMaddog said:

I often get those faux silver box art from Launch Box front end as well...yes even for non Atari games as well!

 

They would be best catergorized as Fanart, though it still bugs me they still considered as "original" box art...

I've looked though my Launchbox install and see none of those fake 2600 boxes labelled as real box fronts - there are a fair few fan-art and reconstructed boxes that look funky, but they are never shown in preference to correct box art in Launchbox, at least in my setup.

 

I grab all images and play in both desktop and big box modes - neither of which push fake boxes as the default box art.

 

Can you give me an example where the "box-front" asset is hooked up incorrectly?

 

      sTeVE

 

[Chris+++]

On 5/16/2022 at 5:30 PM, Room 34 said:

Hi all… if you've been around here for ages you may remember me, but I haven't been posting much. I'm having another wave of nostalgia for Atari 2600. (And I'm freaking out a bit, because I originally came around here when it had been 20 years since I got my Atari 2600… and now it's been 20 years since I joined the AtariAge forums!)

 

Holy smokes! How are ya? I think you turned me onto Porcupine Tree. You're really into prog, right?

 

Damn. Can't get much more off-topic than that, can I.

 

 

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by Chris+++