EmulationStation mod

InsecureSpike

@rookervik said in EmulationStation mod:

Oh I forgot to ask for something! * gets down on knees and begs* Can we have a clock? A clock would be so amazing. I dug out an old "grid dreams" mockup I did. Reminded me about wanting a clock in ES. Keep in mind, it was March when I did this mockup.

did this ever become a feature?
i too would find it extremely useful..... please....

lilbud

@insecurespike Sorry to say, but no. Gridview stopped being worked on by @jacobfk20 a while ago. @Koerty picked it up, so go bother him.

dudleydes

@insecurespike I don't believe the clock was ever a feature of the Gridview mod.

A clock in the corner is a feature in the Pegasus frontend but it's still in development so go bother the Pegasus dev.

InsecureSpike

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

@insecurespike Sorry to say, but no. Gridview stopped being worked on by @jacobfk20 a while ago. @Koerty picked it up, so go bother him.

@dudleydes said in EmulationStation mod:

@insecurespike I don't believe the clock was ever a feature of the Gridview mod.

A clock in the corner is a feature in the Pegasus frontend but it's still in development so go bother the Pegasus dev.

yeah i was wondering if the clock idea had ever been added, not necessarily to the grid view but to ES in general

Zigurana

@insecurespike
No, it has never been added, mostly because there is no Real Time Clock on the little computer. That means that the RPi simply does not know the time when it is powered up. You need to have a working network connection in order to retrieve the current time from your network (or the internet).
I spend an evening or two trying to get a separate RTC chip (like this) to work, just so I could make this happen, but I never got it to run, so that little side-project died an early dead.

It could still be done tough, for those machines that do have a working network connection.

InsecureSpike

@zigurana said in EmulationStation mod:

@insecurespike
No, it has never been added, mostly because there is no Real Time Clock on the little computer. That means that the RPi simply does not know the time when it is powered up. You need to have a working network connection in order to retrieve the current time from your network (or the internet).
I spend an evening or two trying to get a separate RTC chip (like this) to work, just so I could make this happen, but I never got it to run, so that little side-project died an early dead.

It could still be done tough, for those machines that do have a working network connection.

ah, i see, i do leave mine connected, maybe if you get time, and decide to add it, could there be a switch in the UI menu to turn it on/off, like the on-screen help, then its there if the user finds it useful?
with changable font, size, color, position etc

thanks for the reply

Zigurana

@insecurespike
If / when I get to this, it will probably be a themable element, so it would be up to the theme to include and format it. That way, we would have maximum flexibility for how a clock would look like.

mattrixk

@zigurana said in EmulationStation mod:

there is no Real Time Clock on the little computer

That explains why my Kodi time was so out of whack when I took my RPi on holidays last week.

Rookervik

Yeah even for me the clock would be wrong pretty often. But after having my Pi running a couple days the time finally updates. And it's glorious on Kodi to see the time. Imagine the greatness of ES.

Also... ES uses time, already, when writing to the gamelist when you last played the game. Sooooo, there are already tons of time errors being written to disk. LOL.

MatinatorX

Has anyone had any luck getting this mod to work with the latest RetroPie 4.4? It failed to start for me and complained about not having some old libraries, so I made symlinks to the ones included with 4.4, but it gave a different error message and still failed to start.

I tried to recompile it myself using the guide, but the build always fails at around 75% when it can't seem to resolve calls to the OpenGL library (even though I have all the necessary libraries installed). I tried forcing cmake to use other versions of gcc (5.0 instead of 4.7 for example, or the latest one) before building but those all fail too for various reasons, and I'm not familiar enough with coding or what changed between Jessie and Stretch to solve the issue.

I'm trying to avoid the need for a keyboard to connect to WiFi when I head over to friends' houses and the OSK and WiFi config this mod has would be perfect.

Alternatively, does anyone know if the alpha Pegasus frontend includes this feature?

wcarvalho

@matinatorx said in EmulationStation mod:

Has anyone had any luck getting this mod to work with the latest RetroPie 4.4? It failed to start for me and complained about not having some old libraries, so I made symlinks to the ones included with 4.4, but it gave a different error message and still failed to start.

I tried to recompile it myself using the guide, but the build always fails at around 75% when it can't seem to resolve calls to the OpenGL library (even though I have all the necessary libraries installed). I tried forcing cmake to use other versions of gcc (5.0 instead of 4.7 for example, or the latest one) before building but those all fail too for various reasons, and I'm not familiar enough with coding or what changed between Jessie and Stretch to solve the issue.

I'm trying to avoid the need for a keyboard to connect to WiFi when I head over to friends' houses and the OSK and WiFi config this mod has would be perfect.

Alternatively, does anyone know if the alpha Pegasus frontend includes this feature?

I also tried but unfortunately I could not

@jdrassa
would it be possible to deploy this in the official version? Some features of the emulationstation that the recalbox contains, are quite interesting

jdrassa

@wcarvalho If someone comes along and puts in the effort, I am fairly sure that an OSK implementation would be accepted. Adding the WiFi config to ES is unlikely to be added. My understanding is that since RetroPie supports multiple frontends, config stuff like that is to remain in RetroPie-Setup.

wcarvalho

@jdrassa
Thank you

phcreery

The emulationstation file seems a bit old now. It keeps calling for libboost 1.55 which I was unable to install.

sudo apt-get install libboost1.55-all libboost1.55*

only said that the repository doesn't exist. After searching, there seems to be no repository that has it for the arm.

I tried symlinking the new libraries (i think 1.6x)

locate libboost*
ln -s (lib_new_name) (lib_old_name)

to trick it into thinking I have the old and that eventually starts but I get nothing on the display, it just freezes or something.

I have tried to build it with no luck. (renderer_graw_gl failed)

This is all on the RetroPie 4.4
The On-screen keyboard is really what I want since I am running a pi-zero inside a Gameboy. I don't want RecalBox because I still want the full raspbian image and the ability to run scripts for battery monitoring, etc.

Is there any other frontend that supports a virtual keyboard or is there somewhere else that this project is updated?

jacobfk20

If all you're looking for is OSK than I may be able to help you out. It's been a long time since I've done anything with ES but I can probably get the OSK to work fine with the latest version for you.

jacobfk20

I've updated OSK to be flush with RetroPie's master branch. It'll compile now. You can grab it from my github

nicsil

how can i install your ES version on retropie? i cloned it but when i run cmake . i have some errors

Knowcontrol

@jacobfk20 Hi there. I recently got into the RetroPie scene and I came across this thread while searching for improvements to EmulationStation. I read through each and every post in this thread and your project sounds amazing!

You put in so many hours and I would hate to see it not live on. Is there any chance you would be willing to spend an evening bringing your EmulationStation up to date to work with RetroPie 4.5.1, please?

Thank you for all your hard work and I hope to use the frontend soon!

kelvinator3300

@jacobfk20 said in EmulationStation mod:

I've updated OSK to be flush with RetroPie's master branch. It'll compile now. You can grab it from my github

I'm very interested in OSK. That's really the only feature I wish ES had. How do I set this up?