I think this is a good idea, though not one to be taken lightly. Refactorings and cleanups are often double-edged swords, and while I am always supportive of investing time in such endeavors, I fear that we may introduce new bugs and/or remove code that was put there for a reason, even though it might not be at all apparent.

If the scope is more or less well defined upfront (i.e. if we determine that we will look into the screensaver code, or something more), I'm fine with that.

I'm not sure this needs to necessarily be a cross-coordinated effort, though - these efforts are always welcome as long as they're well tested, I believe.

There are a few things on my plate that I'd like to look into, ES-wise, that don't fall into the "new developments" area but rather in the "fixing/improvements" area, namely (in no particular order):

Document OMX and collections features, namely Predictive Profile (High 4:4:4) not working [EASY-ISH] Address textures defaulting to white after returning from an emulator. [MEDIUM?] Improve texture cache to reduce texture pop-in. [MEDIUM?] Fix or mitigate VRAM handling, especially on out-of-memory scenarios. [MEDIUM?] Try to get rid of the two video player options, but rather have a default hardware accelerated player for the Pi that works as intended (i.e. respects the actual layers, rather than being a separate process). [HARD]

I honestly have no idea how to go about several of these, but I secretly hope that with a proper Windows and VS debugging environment I'd be able to make some progress here.

Thanks for starting this.

@dunnieboy Have you made your metadata manager available for download?

@sselph Hey man i have already a gamelist with boxarts and metadata for every game on every system and now i want to use your scaper to add videosnaps to every game. The problem is that i want to append my gamelists and when i do that it doesn't work. It's downloading videosnaps only if i choose overwrite gamelists but i will lose all the metadata and boxarts that i was fighting to build over a year now.
Is there a fix for the append option for gamelists?

@psyke83 Cheers!

Ehm, I don't recall, and I don't feel like opening up my cab right now.

But I don't think it matters much. You will need to use a transistor able to supply current needed by your fan, which likely will be most of them.
Have a look at this article for some more background.

@lostless I would agree with that

I was informed where the random is now..heh..

@herb_fargus Users who wish to contribute but have no coding experience could help with this.

@herb_fargus said in Retropie Youtube channel ??:

I got tired of enabling people to rip off the project with stupid proof tutorials

I dont know how to tackle this but we can try.

This goes hand in hand with @meleu s cheevos scraper!

So the possibility to get games marked that have achievements let us easier select them to collections ;)

@edmaul69 said in Could you make US dollar currency avaliable for donations options?:

@buzz if the currency is affected why is the usd$ still only worth .77£?

They're still in the EU, things will get worse for them once they're out. Most of those guys had no idea for what they've voted and treated it like a Facebook like, didn't take it seriously. Now their own parliament is struggling to get out, because they know what will happen to their economy once they're out.

@RedBatman you can use Google as a currency converter. Just type something like the following in Google's search bar:

10USD to GBP

The first result should be Googles currency converter.

@cyperghost It's good that it's getting this attention, and with the new screenshot-based screensaver, it might be that someone develops that same approach for videos. I believe that'd be the right approach, so fingers crossed :)

@flavor I have some code that does this but it's not yet committed as needs testing. It should enable usbromservice to update when updating retropie without having to disable/re-enable. I will commit it once I have tested it further.

The mario and zelda examples look awful. I'd rather play a game that was meant for 3d.

@anassassinsblade what exactly do you mean by "bought the retro pi 4"? What exactly have you bought?

@hex said in Tutorials Category ?:

Currently the search is broken. If I want to check if a thread solved a problem I have or a feature I need, there is no way to check other than scrolling a lot or asking again

When I face such situation I search at google and it works really fine. I just use "retropie" as the first term searched.

@nowarrivinghere there is no ETA.

@kdretro I tried it but ran into lots of roadblocks. Zerojays repo has a game similar to it but I forget what it's called.

@hurricanefan Heh, yeah... It just kind of grew. It's not a complete list, as I'm sure the "Collection" section will continue to grow as I go through more of my Gamelists.

@joemommasfat Thanks for your reply! I'll watch that thread with interest! I consider the addition of the metadata tag "sortname" as vital for any well-organized collection of games. It's such a simple and useful tool to maintain actual game titles as well as release order.

BTW, for the past few months I've been using my own method for achieving what I wanted. It's not as insane as my earlier post, but it does require a certain level of obsession.

I realized that the vast majority of games organized quite well, and only a few were "out of order", like my Mortal Kombat example above. So I only needed to affect those games, while leaving the rest intact. This led me to abandon the "22... 23... 24..." idea. But I was still thinking about using fonts to solve the issue.

Then I remembered that Unicode has characters that do not display (or just look like spaces). Since these would show up at the end of an alphabetical sort order, I can use them to re-order select objects.

So I looked it up, and saw that I can use the following codes for these characters:
t​ t‌ t‍ t‎ t‏ t‐

And this is how I used them...

<game> <path>./Mortal Kombat.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8203;</name> </game> <game> <path>./Mortal Kombat II.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8204;II</name> </game> <game> <path>./Mortal Kombat 3.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8205;3</name> </game> <game> <path>./Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8206;3: Ultimate</name> </game>

Since the "space characters" show up before the game numeral, and the "space characters" increase, they show up in alphabetical order. All I needed to do now was modify the font I was using to make the "space characters" use the same data/display as a regular space. I did this by opening the font I was using (in this case it was DIN) in a font editor, copying the "glyph" for a regular space, and pasting it into the correct spot for the "space characters" I was using.

It has actually worked out quite well for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with every instance of odd series naming. For example, MK3 Ultimate doesn't work perfectly (It should be called "Ultimate MK3"). Also "Rocket Knight Adventures" and "Sparkster" aren't in the correct order (annoyingly separated by Sonic's games). But this is a large step forward for me, and something I can work with for now.

Here's some other examples that I've done this with...

Name in gamelist.xml Name (and order) as displayed in ES Sonic&#8203;the Hedgehog Sonic The Hedgehog Sonic&#8204;the Hedgehog 2 Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Sonic&#8205;the Hedgehog 3 Sonic The Hedgehog 3 Sonic&#8206;&amp; Knuckles Sonic & Knuckles Sonic&#8206;&amp; Knuckles + Sonic 2 Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 2 Sonic&#8206;&amp; Knuckles + Sonic 3 Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 3 Pokémon&#8203;Red Pokémon Red Pokémon&#8204;Blue Pokémon Blue Pokémon&#8205;Yellow Pokémon Yellow Pokémon&#8206;Gold Pokémon Gold Pokémon&#8207;Silver Pokémon Silver Pokémon&#8208;Crystal Pokémon Crystal Super Star Wars&#8203; Super Star Wars Super Star Wars&#8204;- The Empire Strikes Back Super Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back Super Star Wars&#8205;- Return of the Jedi Super Star Wars - Return of the Jedi Spyro&#8203;the Dragon Spyro the Dragon Spyro&#8204;2: Ripto's Rage! Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! Spyro&#8205;: Year of the Dragon Spyro: Year of the Dragon

@felleg Ha! Yeah, that would be a cool feature. Does anybody have any databases on that type of information though? I know Atari-Age rates the rarity of 2600, 5200, 7800 and Lynx games and I don't think that information changes at all, but they don't keep records of any prices as far as I know.

I think if this feature was added you'd have to have the ability to shut it off, or maybe people would just have to make altered versions of skins that would show it. I don't think that everybody would want that information showing up by default, but I do think it's a cool idea.