Announcing Pegasus Frontend

halfmanhalfcake

Great work. A couple of questions...

Is there a requirement to state the images in the metadata file? or can we continue to use the .../media folder as we do currently?
I assume this method of config files can be used to open windows (.exe) games?
How will pegasus know what directories to look for?

fluffypillow

The media directory will continue to work, there are no fixed asset fields in the metadata format at the moment. I could imagine some extended asset support in the future though.
Yes, you can either set the launch command for each game separately, or list the path to the game exes in a collection, then use ${FILEPATH} as the launch command. You probably don't want to use exe as an extension due to some games have multiple of them.
There'll be an option for that in Pegasus (eventually), and the search directories will be stored in the program's settings file. Other sources like the ES2 systems.cfg could also be used.

hi-ban

@fluffypillow if i was the one developing pegasus, i'd make it use the exact same format as emulationstation. That would ensure perfect compatibility, and it would be much easier for everyone to switch between ES and pegasus with no need to manually add thousands of games to a gamelist or create a custom scraper just for pegasus.

AndersHP

I was also thinking; what happens to us with perfect scraped and described games now, after this is implemented? Do we have to start all over again?

fluffypillow

@hi-ban personally I don't like XML as a user-side data format, and I'm willing to differ in that. The ES2 compatibility will still be available though (that is, this config file style is optional), and I'm also planning to create conversion tools between the two formats.

@AndersHP not at all, I'd like to create some tools for conversion between the two formats, like scripts for on-device conversion and also a webpage for when you're scraping on PC. My scraped data is in the ES2 files too, after all :)

AndersHP

Am I the only one, who cannot get the runcommand menu to work from Pegasus? Game just boots. I have to goto Emulationstation to switch settings for roms, then return to Pegasus afterwards...

Darksavior

@andershp I never had an issue. I did have an issue now that I can't run pegasus at all if it's transferred from pc to pi. It warns me about some security hole ueid or something..

Installing pegasus from retropie-setup works. I just had to point autostart to the pegasus location.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP seems to work fine for me, on a Pi 3 running an older RetroPie install. I'll check if it happens with the latest version. Do you see anything weird in the logs of Pegasus or runcommand?

@Darksavior interesting, can you check the exact warning message? There was also a Permission denied error report some time ago, and it turned out users cannot launch executables on NTFS file systems by default.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP also works fine on an updated RetroPie, hmm.

fluffypillow

Also the weekly changelog (or rather, a summary):

large number of internal changes, as a base for future updates (post)
new config file proposal (post)

In addition, I've just added theme reloading support (with F5); will likely come handy in the future. And since we've also reached alpha4+100, I've reset the counter, we're now in the alpha 5 phase (yay!).

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I still get a permission denied trying to run it if transferring manually. Pegasus transfers with 644 permissions from windows to my pi. I need to change it to 777, and then it works.

I checked now and I don't get the "security hole" error anymore. The only different things I've done was updating retropie and deleting any old pegasus config entries when I decided to make things easier to just install it from retropie-setup and add THAT location to autostart. So now I'm running pegasus from /opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-fe/

Any chance that config might also allow users to adjust the tile rows?

fluffypillow

@Darksavior The number of rows visible depends on the images and your screen size. Since that's the direction you scroll, I don't plan to limit their count.

I you mean columns thought, yes, I'd like theme-specific settings in the future, where things like this could be tweaked.

AndersHP

In extension of an update to Retroarch 1.6.9 going bad, I have to either go back to my backup of 1.6.7 or try a fresh install.. But I just realized that the downloaded_images folder is on the sd-card... Sorry if this is slightly offtopic, but still a bit related to Pegasus:

will moving the entire scrapings to the USB with the ROMS (yes, running roms off USB) slow pegasus down instead of having these on the sd? In the future, it could be cool to have scrapings and roms together, in case I need to start all over (again).
If no to above's speed question: Is there a way to move these maaaaany many files a fast way? I can only access the sd when it's placed in the pi, through Filezilla, putting it in my mac only shows very few folders and files.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Unfortunately, yes, loading is currently slower if your assets are on USB (Pegasus checks which files are accessible, and that's slow). However, this could be improved, and it's exactly something I plan to fix in one of the next updates.
As for Mac, apparently there's something called OSXFuse you can use to mount ext4 file systems. No idea if it works though.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow Thanks for the reply. I will stay with Retroarch 1.6.7 until your next updates then.

AndersHP

Anyone else in here experiencing problems with Retroarch 1.6.9 stated here?

It would be nice to know if this is related to Pegasus.

Darksavior

@andershp said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Anyone else in here experiencing problems with Retroarch 1.6.9 stated here?

It would be nice to know if this is related to Pegasus.

No. Everything is fine here. I must've updated Pegasus last week from retropie setup if it matters.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Pegasus doesn't touch your emulators, and can only run when you launch it. If the problem occurs using other frontends or when Pegasus isn't even installed, I assume the problem is caused by something else.
You've mentioned it works fine with RetroArch 1.6.7 but slows down with 1.6.9, looking at the changelogs (1, 2), I see lots of changes; perhaps some of them are causing you trouble? Or maybe during the update to 1.6.9, something got wrong (eg. during the build)?

AndersHP

In this thread I can confirm that my issues are gone after a simple .cfg file deletion and regenerating.

fluffypillow

Yet another huge patch has just landed in Pegasus: this time I've updated the way games, metadata and assets are found, resulting in improved loading speed.
On my Pi 3 with a Class 10 SD card, I have 3400 games and about 10800 assets; it is loaded by Alpha 5 in about 8-8.5 seconds, while the latest Pegasus loads them in 3.4-3.6 seconds, making it over twice as fast.

Of course, your mileage may vary, as I've only tested it on a Pi 3 + SD card; I'm not sure how much it brings on eg. USB drives.