Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@tronkyfran nice! I think if the Pi can play 3D games properly then you shouldn't have problems showing a simple scene either :)

As for the weekly changelog, I've only had time the weekend, so there are just some minor fixes:

the grid now remembers the launched game when returning from play (< @Darksavior ;) )
memory optimizations: Pegasus now uses a little less RAM

lilbud

Do you think you could add a basic view to Pegasus?

fluffypillow

What kind of basic view? Just the grid without showing the details?

lilbud

@fluffypillow Yeah, just like EmulationStation. A simple list

fluffypillow

This week I've worked on improving the general "user experience":

added confirmation dialog before shutdown and reboot
added an error message when no games have been found
added an error message when the selected theme couldn't be loaded
fixed the antialiasing of the platform bar's edges
made the main menu animations somewhat smoother

Fullscreen support on desktop is also almost done, I'll just have to add the relevant option in the settings menu. I'm also planning to clean that menu up a bit, then add theme-specific settings, which would also allow implementing eg. a basic view for the default theme.

pompitousofseth

I have installed pegasus from the RetroPie setup menu and I have gotten it started. It only shows all of the .jpg images and not the .png images. I got all of the .png images from the Universal XML Scraper today. I have put them in the downloaded_images folder and in the [roms]/media folder and neither work. Any hints on what could be going wrong. Also the log doesn't show any errors except for not being able to load some one the .svg files for the system headers. Thanks. Awesome work BTW!

fluffypillow

@pompitousofseth hm that sounds like a bug, I'll try to reproduce it the afternoon.

fluffypillow

@pompitousofseth just tested on my Pi 3, but everything seems to work fine for me. I'm using both PNG and JPG files too. Are you 100% sure the images are at the correct location with the correct name? On RetroPie, it should be ~/RetroPie/roms/[platform name]/media/, and the image names (without any suffix) should match the rom file name (also see here). The downloaded_images directory is no longer scanned directly, but ES2 gamelist files are supported (ie. if an image shows up in ES2, it should also appear in Pegasus). If it still doesn't work, feel free to open an issue so we can discuss what could be the problem.

AndersHP

Ok, I just installed Pegasus package from the RetroPie Setup... And so... Err... How do I install it, so it replaces ES?

Sorry, I know this is a noob question, since no-one asked before me.. I guess it has to do with the "Build Guide".. I just hoped it would install by itself. I'm no coder...

fluffypillow

@AndersHP you can launch Pegasus manually by calling /opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-fe/pegasus-fe, and to make it start on boot instead of ES2, you'll need to edit the file /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh (replace its content with the path above). There's no menu option for this at the moment, unfortunately (I wonder if there's one for eg. AttractMode?). The build guide describes the building/development setup, as an end-user you won't have to deal with that :) (unless you're interested in it, of course).

AndersHP

@fluffypillow Makes sense - thank you. I searched again, but couldn't find this mentioned anywhere.

I had it up and running. Looks really good!
But since I'm not using a controller but keyboard inputs through iPac, I couldn't really do much. Directionals work fine, and the buttons that's working like Return and Escape all work, but since all other buttons, including shoulder buttons are mapped to work as letters and numbers, these won't work.. The Controller Setup doesn't accept my inputs, so I cannot change anything. Is keyboard inputs not supported yet?

Another peculiar thing: it seems that even though everything is scraped with UXMLS, only those games marked as favorites show up with boxart..?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Sorry, no, keyboard remapping is not yet supported. Until then you could try using some key remapping programs (Joy2Key maybe?), eg. create a custom keymap that is loaded before launching Pegasus. You can find the current default keys here.

Another peculiar thing: it seems that even though everything is scraped with UXMLS, only those games marked as favorites show up with boxart..?

Is there anything common in the image files of the games that have this problem? If you rename the image so that it belongs to a different game, does the image appear? Can you check if the format of the images match their extension? Ie. PNG files are actual PNG files, and not JPG files with .png extension (happened to me with UXMLS!). You can do that with file <filename>. Having box art and being a favorite aren't related inside Pegasus, so I'd guess something happened with the files before.

Omnija

@fluffypillow can you make a new updated video showing all the new cool stuff that's been added?

tronkyfran

Well, my theme is not progressing a lot, sadly. I'm trying to get my head around QML programming but Im afraid its something to spend a lot of time. Im not being capable to understand the inner workings of the netflix theme(Im using that as a base for learning), probably because I overestimated my programming skills, and its a bit depressing.
Its a pity because I got to make blend modes work(separatedly) and finally got to load a 3d model textured, but damn, I wish I had more time to dive in this.
So, if someone with better programming skills wants to lend a hand, or team up with me on making a theme for this would be awesome.
The possibilities are ENDLESS, and I think this frontend deserves a lot more attention and love than its given right now.

herb_fargus

@tronkyfran said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

So, if someone with better programming skills wants to lend a hand, or team up with me on making a theme for this would be awesome.

If only I had better programming skills ;) perhaps one day... Might be helpful to have a mock-up/proof of concept so people have an idea of what you're going for with your theme idea

tronkyfran

I suppose that would be nice!!!!, I can even make an animated mockup if thats useful. I cannot program but I do can design :P jejeje. Ok, Ill go that router, lets see if I can inspire some computer wizard :D

fluffypillow

@omnija Sure, that's a good idea. I'm working on improving the look and feel at the moment though, so if there'd be a new video, I'd like to show that too in it when it's done :)

@tronkyfran I should really write that theming guide one of these days... Something that might help with the Flixnet theme is to follow the commits from the beginning in chronological order. The theme is not the most beginner-friendly (like, there's vertical axis that modifies horizontal axes and such), but I've tried to create commits that are more or less clean and implement only one thing. There's indeed some learning curve, but yeah after that you can do pretty much anything with it :)

AndersHP

Got my entire keyboard mapping arranged to work both with ES and Pegasus now, so I can begin some proper testing. 3 questions:

I tested FBA games, but had to move the images to the rom/media folder, since I guess Pegasus doesn't read the subfolders in the downloaded_images folder? (that's where UXMLS places them, in this example home/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/fba)
What about the other metadata, i.e. the games description? These doesn't show up for me.
Is it really true that every photo from UXMLS has to be renamed, in order to match the supported suffixes? That's a lot of work...

Darksavior

@andershp Unfortunately, there is no scraper that's specially made for Pegasus. I just made it so:

For boxart/game description:
I scraped what I could to get box art. You can use whatever scraper, Pegasus will read it. I used UXS on my pc and made the gamelist.xml point to my usb stick since I'm storing my games there. Doing that gets me boxart/descriptions in ES and Pegasus. Some games no scraper will see so I had to look them up manually. A proper gamelist.xml is required if you want boxart/descriptions. The -image.jpg boxart it scrapes are in home/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/yoursystem

For logo/screenshot:
I'm sure you can get the gamelist.xml to show logo and screenshot and whatnot, but it's where I got tired of scraping, and would probably need to do the xml manually, which I'm not doing. I used UXS again, ignoring the xml it made, I just want the logo/screenshot art. I used a batch renamer on my pc and I renamed the -image.jpg files to -logo.jpg, scraping again to rename to -screenshot.jpg and stuck those in home/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/yoursystem and called it a day.

My results are:
ES shows boxart/descriptions
Pegasus shows boxart/descriptions/logo/screenshot (the one that covers half the screen).I think video previews are still broken so I'm not using them. You can also exit Pegasus to the terminal to see what gamelist.xml's it's loading.

tronkyfran

@fluffypillow Yeah, I can see the potencial to do almost anything and its a Big pro. Im sure that after you make(if you find time) that tutorial people is going to make pegasus shine even more. Meanwhile Ill do as you say and take a look at those commits. Thx a lot for your work again!!