Kids & Kiosk Mode, coming back [testers needed!]

EctoOne

@zigurana I believe that i already asked if it would be possible to choose what can be hidden with a cfg file. Even tho i don't really use the ES menu anymore, it would be great if i could hide options that i (probably) never change again.

paffley

Thanks @Zigurana I totally agree. Good explanation. Keep up the super work! Maybe the defaults could be stored in a settings.cfg file as you say in a future update and more advanced users can edit as appropriate to there build. But for now I think its great as-is.

It was just a thought and I'm not expecting anything from you as you have done amazing already with all your work and we appreciate it al highly. Thanks again.

pjft

@zigurana said in Kids & Kiosk Mode, coming back [testers needed!]:

let users define a custom system with an item for shutdown or reboot, if they want to

Well... if you know that's a valid use case, I'm not sure this is the most reasonable approach. For that purpose, you might as well just have a setting in the settings file (and potentially not on the menu) to enable or disable the start menu altogether from the Kids menu. It's slightly more user friendly to just change a flag in the settings file (even better if it's on the menu, though I understand the "clutter" angle) than to have them create a custom system and entry to do something that's already natively supported by ES. Not to mention that that entry would then show up in all other views.

Just a thought. :)

Zigurana

@pjft yeah, but then we could have another setting like 'show only on Kid-mode' or another Metadata tag,.. Nah, just kidding! 😋 It's a dead end, I agree.

It only crossed my mind because my kids have some difficulty finding the small menus of ES on the handheld, and a separate system could make it nice and obvious.

I' think I'll go with an optional settings entry for hideShutDown

Regarding physical keyboards (pressing F4 to drop to cli), I had planned to keep that functionality intact. That issue is easily solved by removing the keyboard itself, or not?

pjft

@zigurana Yes, it's not an issue. I'm just wondering about people who might run this on a desktop (Xubuntu or Windows), or even a laptop.

But hey, it's minimal. I just raised it in case you hadn't considered the F4 alternative and whether that would or would not be an issue.

I have no problem whatsoever with that, as I run it on the Pi and I have no keyboard attached to it :)

I think it's safe to keep it, and then we see if people complain.

AmadhiX

First off, thanks for the great work on this! I can't wait for the PR to go through so this stuff is available on the master.

While you're locking out ES menu options, I'd like to humbly request a "scraper lock" option. This would disable the Scraper (and maybe "Edit This Game's Metadata"), but leave the other ES options alone.

My use case for this is setting up a system for reasonably savvy adults who might want to change their system volume, try out a new theme, or configure a different kind of controller. I wouldn't want to prevent those things by turning on Kiosk mode, especially if I don't know what controller they'll be using. Certain options, like the VRAM limit, might be potentially disruptive, but are basically recoverable.

But that Scraper... Unless they're familiar with ES setup, they aren't going to know what that does, and it's at the very top of the menu, innocent and enticing. It's capable of wiping out hours of hand curated, difficult-to-recover metadata, and it doesn't give much warning.

I think it would be good to be able to protect that with a setting that you have to deliberately turn off, ideally with some kind of "be careful with this" warning. Also, once the system is all setup, the Scraper just takes up space on the menus, but that's minor compared to the above.

Thanks again for the existing effort and for any consideration on this!

Zigurana

Hi @AmadhiX ,
Thanks for the feedback, did you encounter any issue while testing?

Regarding further flexibility of the items to either show or hide: While I understand the use-case you are describing here, the request is beyond the scope current PR.
What I am trying to cater for here is a limited set of the most common scenarios, and frankly, yours will not easily make the cut.

A better solution for you would be to introduce a separate resource file where all items can be manually selected/deselected, depending on the goal that the end-user has in mind. Like proposed by @Rion, @EctoOne, and @paffley earlier in this thread. That however, is a completely new addition to this PR, and I will not pick that up anytime soon. Sorry.
A quick fix would be to just make all gamelist.xml files read-only, that would prevent alterations from within ES. Or use backups, to restore the systems if/when folks destroy it. It will also affect the recorded play history though.

If you want to get your hands dirty, it's very easy to remove the scraper menu option altogether, just comment out this line, recompile ES, and you are good to go.

AmadhiX

Hi @Zigurana,

Thanks for the detailed response, even if the answer was no. :P

I haven't had a chance to test out the latest yet, but I've been keeping an eye on the kid/kiosk branch for a bit and am really glad someone is "bringing it home." I'll check it out with @meleu's tool and post my findings.

I don't think read-only xml files will prevent images from being overwritten, and I don't necessarily want to recompile as a one-off, but I really appreciate your taking the time to offer up those solutions. Maybe one of these days I'll have the time to actually dive into ES and put together a PR of my own. :)

Thanks again!

paffley

@Zigurana I'm now running the kiosk mode from the official repo and its 100% !

The only thing I would love to see (on my personal build) would be the 'Theme' select option as I like to flick through different themes depending on my mood ha!

If you ever decide to create the .cfg file for what is to be displayed (true/false) as discussed previously, please let me know and ill test for you.

Keep up the great work guys, retropie has come so far! You guys are a credit to the scene.

darknior

Woaw i miss this thread before, cool to see all you tests :D
The dream will become reality !!!
Winter is coming, and with it Kiosk Mode <3

Zigurana

This has just been merged into the master branch,~~so if you update from source, you will get it!~~

Edit: I was wrong, see BuZz's response below.

Thanks everyone, for testing this out!

BuZz

@zigurana They will need to update retropie-setup and install emulationstation-dev from experimental or else they won't get it since it's not yet merged to the stable branch which we track from the main emulationstation module

Cjax08

@buzz I’ve been trying to follow this the best I can and I know I already updated from source a while back and got the kiosk UI mode added to my build by just updating emulation station and retropie setup. What exactly is it that is still only included in the dev branch? At this point should I just wait and it’ll be merged to the master soon? I’m assuming it’s the finished kids mode and whatever goodies come with that.

dsstrainer

@paffley 100% agreed with paffley!

pjft

@cjax08 features are only graduated to the main branch after sufficient testing in the development branch, so really the more people test it the better.

darknior

@buzz Thanks for the DEV build, it works perfectly :D

@Zigurana I want to try all the options of this new Kids & Kiosk Mod, i write this little notice to know if i forgot noting ?

UI mode to "Full" (no changes), or "Kiosk" which will hide all menu items that can potentially alter the system configuration.
These include:

For Kiosk, that would mean filtering out all items with the hidden Metadata tag set to true (black-listing).

For kids-mode, it would mean filtering out all items, except for the ones with the kid tag set to true (white-listing) .

In the Start / GuiMenu : All items except for the "Quit" menu, which only contains the "shutdown system" option.

In the Select / GamelistOptions : The CustomCollection menus, and Edit Metadata

As was the case with the previous implementation, unlocking the protected mode (Kiosk), is done by inputting the konami cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a).

Detail :

KIOSK MODE REMOVED OPTIONS
GAMELIST MENU :

JUMP TO LETTER : ??? Why ? Is it possible to make it come back please ? It is important for big rom collections...
EDITING THIS GAME METADATA : OK

GUI MAIN MENU :

SCRAPER : OK
SOUND SETTING -> ONLY VOLUME OPTION : OK
UI SETTINGS : OK
GAME COLLECTION : OK
OTHER SETTINGS : OK
CONFIGURE INPUT : OK But it can't alter the system configuration, and without it we can't add a new Gamepad if a friend come with it to home...
QUIT : OK But is it possible to enable the RESTART EMULATIONSTATION to let us add or modify a game on gamelist.xml with PC by SSH. We don't have the option RELOAD GAMELIST on RETROPIE :(
And i'm agree with @pjft for this menu configuration, for my part i prefer remove the Shutdown option too.

Now i must test the KID mod to see what more is removed and if the Gamepad-shortcut for toggling favs was removed.

But i'm locked on KIOSK mode, KONAMI code not working, help please.

Zigurana

Hi @darknior
There is no reason to yell like that, I can read normal fonts just fine.

To switch back, please have a look here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation#switching-modes
What type of controller are you using?

I'll have a look at the jump-to-letter functionality. Should be easy enough to fix.
Regarding the Quit menu: There is a non-communicated setting: hideQuitMenuOnKidUI, which will hide the Quit menu altogether when set to true. I am not planning on restoring RESTART EMULATIONSTATION in kiosk mode, you should revert back to Full mode when you are in a administration session.

darknior

@zigurana said in Kids & Kiosk Mode, coming back [testers needed!]:

There is no reason to yell like that, I can read normal fonts just fine.

Sorry lol it's because i write all UPERCASE like on the ES menu, i don't want to cry :p

darknior

Thanks for jump-to-letter functionality

I try again the code and now it works fine ... strange ...
I have a x360 Pad and a SFC30 Pad. Now it works with the SFC30.

Thanks for the doc link :)

Zigurana

@darknior
I've prepared a PR for the JUMP TO functionality.
The list of characters now only contains those that are actually present in the list, rather than the complete alphabet. Also added support for numbers and (some) symbols while I was at it.

If you would be so kind to test this, using the excellent test tool, I would be most obliged!

repo: zigurana\EmulationStation
branch: JumpToLetterWhenFiltered