Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@Darksavior I've made an experimental build that should fix the problem, could you check it? It's here.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow That fixed the problem, thanks. Marquees and screenshot backgrounds are back.

halfmanhalfcake

How's the progress on the custom config files?

fluffypillow

@halfmanhalfcake I've just finished the implementation - all that's left is to write some documentation and create a site for converting between the different file formats (eg. ES2 gamelist).

halfmanhalfcake

Thanks for the update :)

fluffypillow

The structure of the site is mostly complete, and gamelist.xml -> metadata.txt conversion works too. I'll add the reverse direction and the systems support, then do a release.

AndersHP

Sounds exciting. Does this mean the favorites button as well as the page up/down functionality is on the way also? :)

fluffypillow

@andershp Yeah, after this is done I can finally start working on all the smaller stuff I've promised to do way before.

AndersHP

This post is deleted!

shantigilbert

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@shantigilbert this might help with static linking issues

Thanks! I will check it out!

fluffypillow

All right, the file format conversion page is done, next I'll update the docs and Pegasus itself.

fluffypillow

Just to let you know, the reason this got delayed so much is because I keep tweaking the file formats, like, fixing stuff that got annoying after lots of use or looked good before but ugly with real data. It's kind of an iterative process, but every time I do that, I update the implementation, the automatic tests, the converter site, the documentations, the default theme... but! I think it'll be finally done this week.

lilbud

@fluffypillow Yep, I think this happens with all projects.

Creating: 2 weeks
Making changes: Not sure how to write an infinity symbol

fluffypillow

All right, took some time but finally it's done; the metadata and collection config files are now implemented and working, and as such Pegasus no longer depends on ES2.

The config file format was changed 25973 times and received a large overhaul. It's documented here, with all the supported fields and such.
A site for converting between different frontend formats (where possible) is now available here (currently supporting Pegasus and ES2).

ES2 is still supported and will continue to work, so you aren't forced to use the new files if you don't wish. Steam will also continue to 'just work'.

There were also a few changes in the theme API:

Collection names are now the unique identifiers for a collection
The Collection tag field got renamed to shortName and is now optional (ie. might be empty)
The tag field itself is now deprecated: you'll get a warning when it's used in a theme, and eventually it will be removed in future releases

The documentations, tutorials and the API reference have been updated to reflect these changes.

This patch should also fix themes appearing multiple times on Windows, and detecting scripts in [program dir]/scripts (turns out this didn't work before).

hooperre

@fluffypillow Been following this since it's inception installed once and just gave it a shot. It's amazing! Great work!

I apologize if I missed some conversation, and I already know you've fielded a lot of feature requests, but I'm curious about some things as a long time ES user. Should be fairly easy and quick to answer!

How do I erase a button config in Pegasus? My trigger and shoulder buttons are the same and I can't seem to clear them.
Hidden files in ES appear in Pegasus. Is this a current feature I'm not seeing and, if not, will this be added in the future?
Also, I'm sure this has been answered, but status on custom collections? ducks

Anyway, I'll be migrating over as your work is wonderful!

halfmanhalfcake

@fluffypillow Great work, thanks for doing this.

This might be a stupid question, but I don't see the tags/info for the images, boxart, fanart, etc. in the new config files?

fluffypillow

@hooperre Thanks! Yeah gamepad support would need some more love, currently you can reset the settings by deleting pegasus_frontend.ini from the config directory (~/.config/pegasus-frontend/).

Hidden files in ES appear in Pegasus

Hm, is there a flag in ES2 that hides games? I can't seem to find it documented in the official repo.

@halfmanhalfcake The assets are still loaded from the media dir currently. I haven't added them (yet) since that can be usually guessed from the file. (I 'm pretty sure someone mentioned this before, but I can't seem to find that comment, sorry)

hooperre

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@hooperre Thanks! Yeah gamepad support would need some more love, currently you can reset the settings by deleting pegasus_frontend.ini from the config directory (~/.config/pegasus-frontend/).

Hidden files in ES appear in Pegasus

Hm, is there a flag in ES2 that hides games? I can't seem to find it documented in the official repo.

Well, the gamepad support is an awesome feature, honestly. My 2 cents: a simple "Start button binds configs. Green means selected. Blue means actively binding," or however you wanted to word it over the hold B to exit would have answered my questions regarding it. That being said, it was pretty simple to figure out intuitively.

I'm not sure if it's an official thing. It was a feature added when people started discussing the Kids version? Either way, there is a <hidden> tag in my XML file. I use it to hide works in progress in final builds for my brother and cousin. For example, I was working on Intellivision and now that the lr-freeintv core has been added, I've changed <hidden> from true to false on Intellivision games. It's a neat feature. My Windows 95 in dosbox experiment for example is still true haha. So they don't see it in their builds, but I don't necessarily need to delete them either.

Anyways, great job!

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I got the new pi3 b+ and using the retropie stretch image, and I noticed that if I exit the reicast emulator, my pi crashes to the commandline with the error EGL Error : Could not create the egl surface: error = 0x300b. I can't use my keyboard but the cursor is blinking which I think that part is just a bug with the kb not working like in runcommand? Reicast exits normally in ES. I haven't tried testing on my old pi3 or the jessie image.

fluffypillow

@hooperre I've checked the code of ES, so the <hidden> tag can be set in gamelist.xml for individual games (but not for systems), right?

@Darksavior couldn't try this on a Pi 3 yet, sorry. If you have one lying around, with a working setup, perhaps you could try reproducing the error there? The error itself means something like Pegasus couldn't recreate its graphical window - whether that's because the new hardware or due to Reicast, I can't tell.