Emulator

Here are the locations of the data available for these games on Gametdb.com:
* https://www.gametdb.com/Wii/R8XZ52
* https://www.gametdb.com/Wii/SGXE41

Have you tried deleting all files from your Cache/GameCovers folder in your Dolphin User directory?

Edit: You might wanna try deleting Cache/gamelist.cache too while you're at it.

I tried using the Purge Game List Cache from the View menu but I have not tried it manually yet. Which folder is it?

Okay, so I removed the /cache folder under Dolphin and that fixed one of the two. I guess the Purge... option on the menu is not the same as actually purging the folder manually. Even so, Top Shot: Dinosaur Hunter (R8XZ52) did not correct itself.

The purge option in the menu is the same as deleting gamelist.cache.

I just checked the GameCovers subfolder and an image for R8XZ52 is not in there. Not sure why because it is accessible at:

https://www.gametdb.com/Wii/R8XZ52

My guess is that there is no high quality ("HQ") image available for that title. However, there is one for the low resolution and the cover art cache is low resolution anyway. It seems to only be looking for high resolution images and not the one available at:

https://art.gametdb.com/wii/cover/EN/R8XZ52.png

I was able to manually download that image and place it in the GameCovers cache folder which at least temporarily fixed the issue. Seems like a good idea for the cover art downloader to try for HQ images, but fail over to the low resolution image if an HQ one isn't available. Especially since the stored images are only thumbnail size anyway.

spycrab0 wrote:

It also seems to occur only for this game, since it didn't occur for any of the games in JMC's expansive NTSC-U library

Since I listed two offending games in my original ticket, this is clearly not "only for [one] game". It may be limited in scope, but not that limited.

Are they listing games by their 2-character country code or by their 2-character language code? Is there API documentation that proves this is a "bug"? Or should the scraper be capable of checking both?

Just to prove the point, here is another game listed as "EN":

https://www.gametdb.com/Wii/SKTP78

I found this just by spot-checking on my fourth try.

Oh, I think I see what you're saying. It is specifically the combination of NTSC_U and EN that is a bug. EN is used all the time with PAL listings.

I got a response from GameTDB:

Hi spycrab,

It was intentional, because X, Y and Z region codes were used by PAL games, at least at first, then some NTSC games were released with it. So it was a way to make it work with existing programs that used the database and relied on the ID to find the covers (E for Us, P, D, F, I, S, H, X, Y, Z for PAL). I hope it didn't cause too much trouble. If you'd like we could move all these to US, but it would break it for other programs. I could also try to find a solution to make them available in both EN and US. Let me know.

Here's the list of what we have set to NTSC, with covers set to EN:
'RUHX52','SLAZ78','RQPZ52','R38X78','RPWZ41','RU5Y4Q','STSZ4Q','SD2Y41','SMOX41','SG2YFS','R8XZ52','SFWZ69','SJDY41','SJDZ41','SEPZ41','STRX4Q','SKYY52','SDUX41','SSPY52','SK7XVZ','SC7Z52','SM8X52','DDWX18','RVYX52','SVXX52','SK8X52','SHVX78','SB9X78'

I don't really get the response. I guess it's the way it is for historic reasons? :/

I'd let him know it would be nice for both EN and US to work I guess.. so we can rely on at least one of them to always exist.

On second thought, only using the fourth character of the game ID and not paying attention to the region code at all would break RLWW78. (Which way we do it would also matter for Korean GC games, but it seems GameTDB doesn't actually have any Korean GC covers, at least not for the games I checked.) So we should probably just hardcode X/Y/Z to use EN instead of US.