Announcing Pegasus Frontend

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.

halfmanhalfcake

Great work :)

Any ETA on a theme guide? I've tried to play around with QT Creator but no luck in terms of a working theme

AndersHP

@fluffypillow impressive work, can't wait to try it out. What about placing images on USB, will this be equally fast or still faster on SD?

fluffypillow

@halfmanhalfcake hopefully before Christmas :) The plan is that now I start working on the config file format, as it'll be used by the themes, then I start writing the theming guide.

@AndersHP as far as I know, they both should have the same possible reachable speed on a Pi. But unless you have a very fast SD card (UHS class), USBs in general might be faster.

AndersHP

With about 5000 games read from USB and assets off SD, Pegasus loads in 21 secs in Alpha 5 but 24 secs in the newest release. Maybe I should try moving artwork to USB also... Should this just lie in the roms/media folders?

fluffypillow

@andershp hmm this difference is really interesting... I'll see if I can figure out what causes this slowdown. As for game assets, they are searched in [game's directory]/media, see this comment.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow My USB drive with the games are probably not very fast, and I have video, logo and boxart per game, ran from the microSD (class 10).

Assembling all these on the USB thumbdrive, maybe a faster one, could bring the loading time down I guess? But still, it's quite a lot more time than your setup? Maybe a fresh Retropie install is needed?

Darksavior

@fluffypillow With the new build my ~2000 games from USB load in around 5 seconds, nice. @AndersHP I got better speeds from microsd, so I keep my artwork there. Videos crash or glitch out on pegasus the last time I tried so I don't use them.

AndersHP

@darksavior Hmm. What USB drive do you use? Something fancy? There's a long way up to my 24 secs.
I think video previews are so nice, which glitches have you encountered?

Darksavior

@andershp I'm using a 128gb SanDisk USB 2.0 stick. I don't remember if it's formatted to 32k or 64k clusters.

Maybe it's changed lately, but the last time I tried videos, like 6 months+ ago, some videos would give me a garbled image and if I started to scroll down, Pegasus would crash. No real loss...I still have a ton of artwork to scrape.

AndersHP

I'm considering a fresh install with less games also. Really, this has been a big test for my build, but the "paralyzation of choice" is kicking in with so many games. It's unnecessary.

I have only experienced that Pegasus occasionally quits to terminal when scrolling through many games, but I still hope @fluffypillow introduces a Page Down/Up function at some point, and this might help, since Pegasus then doesn't have to load so many videos redundantly when scrolling.

fluffypillow

@andershp yup, still on my todo list :)

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I just noticed the new pegasus build no longer sees my sub folders. Snes msu1 games are required to be in subfolders because they're multiple files. ES still sees the folders. They are located under /media/usb0/snes/msu1/if it matters.

Also, in the future will you be adding some fast scrolling on pad? The type ES has where you hold down DOWN, then it starts to scroll at a normal rate, then a few seconds later it speeds up.

Oh, and yes, I mean columns, not rows.

fluffypillow

@darksavior Should be fixed now, thanks!

Also, in the future will you be adding some fast scrolling on pad?

Personally I prefer the way it works right now (I tend to trigger the fast scroll accidentally), but that can be changed in the themes.
A letter indicator/scrollbar would be nice though.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow No worries, thanks.

danielmewhouse

Hi guys, what's up? I've installed Pegasus-FE recently on my Pi, but I don't know how to launch it. Someone could help me? I've installed from experimental packages on RetroPie Setup menu.

AndersHP

@danielmewhouse said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Hi guys, what's up? I've installed Pegasus-FE recently on my Pi, but I don't know how to launch it. Someone could help me?

Yes, I asked this question too.. Right here :)

AndersHP

I'm about to start scraping all over, but in case I need to do this another time, it would be nice to have both art and games on USB instead of microSD.

@fluffypillow You say that generally USB and MicroSD should be equally fast, maybe USB could be faster.
@Darksavior you say that USB is slower.

Do you guys think, if I get a USB 3.1 drive (they should be way faster even though I know the Pi only supports USB2.0), this could be a good solution with both art and roms on USB?

What about Emulationstation, will this still work and show art if it's placed in romsfolder/media?

fluffypillow

@andershp (sorry for the late reply)
Really depends on the drives you use. Many 2.0 drives don't reach the maximum possible speed the Pi supports, while with a 3.x drive it's more likely. A good SD card may also reach the full speed, but to me they seem to be slower.

Some benchmarks:

What about Emulationstation, will this still work and show art if it's placed in romsfolder/media?

Should work fine, as long as the paths to the rom directories are valid. Actually if you're just moving your games/assets to USB, you could just correct the paths in the ES2 systems config file, no need for a full scraping.

fluffypillow

It got a bit delayed with the holidays, but the theme guide is in progress now.