Guide: Video on Launching Game

[wcarvalho]

Good morning, first of all I thank all the members for the shared knowledge here, I learned a lot here. Among others, I learned how to do it.
I would like to share a knowledge with you, something that often we also spend more time personalizing our image than playing, which ends up being more personal by making the customization.
About my personalization I'm doing my image in the shape of Pipboy (fallout), once I finish the topic I'll post it here in the forum, there are still things I want to test and improve.

But we go to the Guide, at first when I saw the types of customization of Retropie, I always imagined that it would do more things, and sometimes even interesting possibilities, even if sometimes limited to our knowledge or even hardware. For this customization, I tested a lot of things until I got to this result, which is very simple of course, one of them being to change the source code of the runcommand itself.

In the es_system.cfg file (https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Add-a-New-System-in-EmulationStation), we have seen that the structure for a system to work without problems is as follows

<system>
<name> nes </ name>
<fullname> Nintendo Entertainment System </ fullname>
<path> / home / pi / RetroPie / roms / nes </ path>
<extension> .nes .zip .NES .ZIP </ extension>
<command> /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 SYS nes% ROM% </ command>
<platform> nes </ platform>
<theme> nes </ theme>
</ system>

In the <command> tag it accepts to add other commands, so we will call the omxplayer to run the video that will appear

Add the command at the beginning of the tag this way

omxplayer -b "directory where my video is.mp4"> / dev / null & amp; & amp;

At where:
omxplayer -b "directory where is my video.mp4"
Will run the video by oxmplayer

Where: > / dev / null & amp;
will run the process in the background, not displaying information in the terminal, so that only the video will appear.
PS: The correct command is > / dev / null &, but as we are working with XML so that & be understood we put it that way & amp;

From & amp;
Add Without space, I added the space because the command with no space here in the forum does not appear the way I want to show.

And after the video we will say that another command will be performed, so we will need to add one more & amp;
For example, in practice

<command> omxplayer -b /home/pi/video/launching.mp4> / dev / null & amp; /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 SYS nes% ROM% </ command>

It will still be a detail, it will run the video but will still appear the screen of the runcommand, so that it does not appear, just open the configuration page of the runcommand (https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/ runcommand)
In Launch Menu, disable it, once done reboot the system and when starting the game will run the video that you put, in case you need to change the emulator that will run the game, simply activate the runcommand again setar the emulator, and then disable the runcommand to show only the video.

In practice, it will be as in the video of my image:

Ps: Sometimes it can happen Bugs, but in a way, it has rarely happened to me, but it works perfectly.
I'm sorry if my English is bad, it's not my official language.
Any doubt I am available

[cyperghost]

@wcarvalho said in Guide: Video on Launching Game:

Pipboy

I like the videos. Do you think you can make them available for us?

One hint ;)
We have the runcommand and a runcommand-onstart.sh - see here so you can directly launch your video without editing the es_system.cfg

Why this is bad? Because if you update RetroPie, your "customized" es_systems can be overwritten.

[wcarvalho]

@cyperghost Yes, I will make it available at the end, but the theme I'm doing for the 16: 9 format. This did not work thanks, I will test later, I imagined that I could do this but I tried to edit the direct source code of the runcommand but it did not work and when I analyzed the es_system, I imagined that the <command> tag could call another command that I left there also.
On the upgrade I imagined this, at least I updated it from 4.3 to 4.4 and did not lose it, but also my es_system is in the emulationstation folder that is shared and accessed by the network

[cyperghost]

@wcarvalho I think you misunderstood me ;)

type nano /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh
and enter your line omxplayer -b "directory where my video is.mp4" > /dev/null
Than your video should launched everytime before ROM is called. And it will work for all systems. So you don't have to edit 20x the es_systems.cfg. I agree I didn't test this approach but it sounds logical to me, that it should work.

But nice catch with the XML and &amp thing.

A video download available would be nice anyway - youtube would be enough and it will widespread a mass of audience ;)

EDIT:
You can do same with runcommand-onend.sh and can play a small video like .... Back to ES or something. I like the idea!

[wcarvalho]

@cyperghost I understood the runcommand_onstart question, sorry for not being explicit about it. when I mentioned that I edited the source code, it went straight to runcommand.sh
But it is good to know and know other ways to do the same thing, I ended up making this guide because I have not seen anywhere teaching it. I have not even discovered that it is possible to remove that rainbow splashscreen when raspberry is turned on by editing /boot/config.txt and adding the command disable_splash = 1 together with custom videos the effect gets cool

Edit: This issue of & amp; I realized during a scrap done by the retropie in one of my systems, that he add this code so that xml reads and writes on the screen & without peo

[wcarvalho]

@cyperghost said in Guide: Video on Launching Game:

You can do same with runcommand-onend.sh and can play a small video like .... Back to ES or something. I like the idea!

Sorry for the delay in answering, I had some personal problems.
I tested the command directly on runcommand-onstart and it worked perfectly. Thanks for the tip

[cyperghost]

@wcarvalho said in Guide: Video on Launching Game:

Sorry for the delay in answering, I had some personal problems.

No problem at all, you're welcome. Tidy your things in RL then you have more fun at all and for RP ;)

[markyh444]

I found this post recently and thought it was a great idea, so I have modified the launching image for each system I have installed into an animation instead. I've created a little script that pulls through the system variable and then looks for the launching.mp4 file in each of the image directories I have my scraped artwork in.

It works great, so thought I'd share it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
 
system="$1"
viddir="$HOME/RetroPie/roms/$system/images"
 
omxplayer -b "$viddir/launching.mp4" > /dev/null
 
fi

I saved this as launch-video.sh and placed it in the configs/all directory and then edited the runcommand-onstart.sh file to include the path of the script in quotations so it will load. I admit, I'm really not a coder, so I copied the layout of @meleu 's joystick-selection script and added the same "$@" at the end of the line. I assume this did something fancy, as my script didn't work without it, and worked great with it. (I'd be happy if somebody could enlighten me as to it's purpose, as I'm always wanting to learn.)

So anyways, same thing applies as with the OP's guide and you'll need to turn off the runcommand menu for it to not appear after the video has ran. I basically mocked up a similar loading screen to my Original NES splash I made ages ago -

but instead of it loading up the "Nintendo Presents" bit, it loads a system-specific loading splash then fades to black. It's dead simple, but I like it.

Anyway, feel free to steal my hashed-together script it you want.

[cyperghost]

@markyh444 $@ expands all command parameters....
so $@ pathes $1 $2 $3 ... to your script

[EldelinCuent]

hey thnx for the share , i like this video loading it give an extra to this great retro gaming Pi ....
but my problem is i cant get it to run i think i forgot something ..When i start a game i still get the Image instead of video launching.
I adjust the run command and linked my Video Dir In it. Im pretty sure i need to do something else or adjust another script , but here im Lost haha :D i Video Tutorial would be great since the One ETA Prime shared is Broken , that link wont work --->

Greets

[Peridot]

@markyh444 said in Guide: Video on Launching Game:

I found this post recently and thought it was a great idea, so I have modified the launching image for each system I have installed into an animation instead. I've created a little script that pulls through the system variable and then looks for the launching.mp4 file in each of the image directories I have my scraped artwork in.

It works great, so thought I'd share it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
 
system="$1"
viddir="$HOME/RetroPie/roms/$system/images"
 
omxplayer -b "$viddir/launching.mp4" > /dev/null
 
fi

I saved this as launch-video.sh and placed it in the configs/all directory and then edited the runcommand-onstart.sh file to include the path of the script in quotations so it will load. I admit, I'm really not a coder, so I copied the layout of @meleu 's joystick-selection script and added the same "$@" at the end of the line. I assume this did something fancy, as my script didn't work without it, and worked great with it. (I'd be happy if somebody could enlighten me as to it's purpose, as I'm always wanting to learn.)

So anyways, same thing applies as with the OP's guide and you'll need to turn off the runcommand menu for it to not appear after the video has ran. I basically mocked up a similar loading screen to my Original NES splash I made ages ago -

but instead of it loading up the "Nintendo Presents" bit, it loads a system-specific loading splash then fades to black. It's dead simple, but I like it.

Anyway, feel free to steal my hashed-together script it you want.

This seems like a nice way to do it, so thanks!

Can you post the exact line you added to runcommand-onstart.sh ? I looked at meleu's joystick-selection script but couldn't find anything. Thanks in advance.

[markyh444]

@peridot it was the path to my script with "$@" at the end

[cyperghost]

@peridot The user @7heSandman created some wonderfull system startup videos. I think that will fit all your needs

[n4tur3502]

Is something like this possible for the ubuntu version of retropie? I have tried searching all over but cant seem to find anything. Maybe im just out of luck.

[albpara]

I was looking to something like this. My idea was to add something like the retro analog tv snow/noise before launching the game.

I disabled the runcommand output and added the video to the runcommand-onstart.sh as suggested but there is a big delay between the end of the video and the start on the game and I don't see such delay in your video @wcarvalho.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for information guys :)

[cyperghost]

@albpara
You can try to add an ampersand after the launching line in runcommand
omxplayer -b "path/to/video/launching.mp4" > /dev/null &