Announcing Pegasus Frontend

Purg.Derren

Hi,
First of all, i want to say BIG THANKS to your effort! I'm looking for a loooong time for a way to use my rom collection in a "comfortable" way, but since years - it was always just a half solution.

Retroarch was / is a nice one, with nice cores, but i not really like the "optics" (even they made the xmb, a ps3 like theme or the new one... i dont like it that way). Then i was looking for front-ends like EmulationStation or "solutions" like Hyperspin, or even a paid front-end by a spanish guy ... but i was always disappointed - it was too much or too less...
then, some days ago, i found pegasus-frontend - and when i found out, it started already over a year ago, i was shocked, that i couldn't find it ealrier! (why it's so hard to find your project? we should change it!)

I hope prey, that you wont stop the work on it, coz it's amazing! Its with theme support, it multi-plattform, it's VERY EASY to use and open for - everything - to use with!

Secondly - a little wis-list and some questions :P

It would be cool to have an options in future to change the color or completely deactivate the "seleced-cover-background" (the blue, android'ish background).
It there a way to prevent pegasus from using the "es_systems.cfg"
[ the gamelist.xml work's fine, but when i don't rename the es_systems.cfg, the covers of the nintendo entertainment system not showing up!? - all other systemss cover work, but the NES ones not - even i always copied the nes "node" and edited for all other systems ...]
What i have to do, to add covers / banners for the steam games? do i have to make a gamelist.xml, like for other systems for steam or is there any other way?
When i start a rom/game, pegasus closes and some seconds later, retroarch or a game launches. Is there a way to make it more "seamless" (it's still much better then on the emulationstation, but maybe i made smth wrong - coz i've read somewhere, that on pegasus it's already "seamless")

fluffypillow

@purg-derren Thanks, glad you like it :)

It would be cool to have an options in future to change the color or completely deactivate the "seleced-cover-background" (the blue, android'ish background).

I haven't got around to it yet, but theme specific options is a planned feature, so yup, it will be added eventually.

It there a way to prevent pegasus from using the "es_systems.cfg" ... the covers of the nintendo entertainment system not showing up

Hm that's interesting, could you upload the es_systems.cfg somewhere (eg. pastebin or in a new issue)?

What i have to do, to add covers / banners for the steam games? do i have to make a gamelist.xml, like for other systems for steam or is there any other way?

There's no built-in way for that at the moment, so for now creating collection/metadata files and placing the assets there would be necessary. I should improve this in the future.

Is there a way to make it more "seamless"

Well I'm not sure it can be improved further than that. Pegasus closes when the launched program reports that it has started -- if after that it still takes seconds for the program to show something on the screen, that's not a thing I can control. As a workaround, you could do tricks like setting up a full screen black background, or running Pegasus in silent mode (if you're on a Pi or using a terminal).

why it's so hard to find your project?

I guess marketing isn't my strong suit, I'm a bit relying on word-of-mouth :)

fluffypillow

And another weekly changelog!

Third-party data sources (EmulationStation and Steam) can now be enabled/disabled in the Settings menu
Most settings are now stored in <config-dir>/settings.txt (instead of pegasus-frontend.ini, which is somewhat more troublesome to handle internally)
- This will also cause your current settings (fullscreen, locale and theme) to be reset -- sorry about that!
Made pegasus-frontend.org mobile friendly
Added a "Getting started" guide to the documentation
Fixed some outdated information and typos in the documentation
Fixed the documentation link in the Help menu not reacting to mouse clicks
Fixed window focusing issues with the locale and theme selector panels in the Settings menu
Fixed the game directory selector issues on Windows and Android

Also in case anyone's interested, I've launched an experimental Patreon page. Don't worry, whether it's successful or not, Pegasus will still continue to be free and open source.

fluffypillow

Also I've just marked this release as Alpha 9, as there might be some new (and experimental) features coming this week.

niculinux

Super, thanks!

fluffypillow

Changelog time!

It is now possible to manually set assets in the metadata file
It is now possible to manually set default assets in the collections file
- Except it's not supported yet in the default theme...
It is now possible to use absolute paths in the collections and metadata file
It is now possible to add additional search directories to the collections in the collections file (in addition to the one where the collections.txt file itself is placed)
It is now possible to create a global collections file, a la ES2
- Pegasus will look for a collections.txt file under <config dir>/global_collection (name may change in the future)
It is now possible to set summary and description for collections
It is now possible to set the working directory when launching things
- It can be set per-game and per-collection as well
- Now correctly defaults to the directory of the launched file (fixes some interesting occurences on Windows especially)
Asset searching is now documented
Added GOG support for Linux (desktop) and Windows
- Windows: it just works. Similarly to GOG Galaxy, games installed older than a few years might not be detected, due to a change in the games' installers. In this case, try downloading the game again from GOG.com and reinstall it.
- Linux: there's way less information available offline, so support is a bit hit and miss. Games installed in the default location (<home>/GOG Games) can be detected, but assets might me missing. (If you have the games somewhere else, you can always just create symlinks). If you have games that refuse to show up, feel free to report it.
- Known issue: There is no video support yet because most of them are hosted on YouTube, which is a pain to use outside of a browser
Updated the documentation here and there
More accurate reporting of errors in config files

As always, comments are welcome.

tronkyfran

@fluffypillow Awesome,keep going!!!!!

GeekOB

I've signed up just to post here :) I think Pegasus has a lot of potential, loving it so far. Happy to follow your progress @fluffypillow , I don't like the lack of customization ES offers.
My only question for now is, are there any "finalized" themes that I can try? (looking at you @tronkyfran ;) huge fan here )
the flixnet theme seems broken as all I see is two entries with black background.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

halfmanhalfcake

@fluffypillow Keep up the good work, still using it over any other frontends.

fluffypillow

@GeekOB Actually I do plan spending one of these weeks with creating themes (gotta show the power of Pegasus!) but then always end up working on things less visual. Please bear with me until then :)

In other news, I've changed the URL of some pages in the documentation (in case someone has links/bookmarks to them). Also rearranged some contents and added a few new pages too.

fluffypillow

Yet another announcement, keyboard keys will likely change in the next release. Currently the game details panel is opened with Ctrl and the filter panel with Shift. I'd like to free these keys to avoid interference with eg. text editing, so instead the new keys would be I (as in info) and F (as in filter/find) instead. Would this cause issues for anyone?

herb_fargus

@fluffypillow these would just be deafults no? Are. There any plans to be able to configure menu controls like with ES?

fluffypillow

@herb_fargus yup, just the defaults... except you can't change from these defaults yet :) There are plans to also make keyboard keys configurable, it just haven't got implemented yet.

EctoOne

@fluffypillow I hope custom controls are not too far away. My cursor up key is broken and that's what's why I haven't spent much time with Pegasus. Using a virtual keyboard is just annoying sometimes.

herb_fargus

@fluffypillow yep sounds good to me. Defaults don't really matter to me if they can be changed.

GeekOB

@fluffypillow Do you plan on supporting subfolder structure for the media directory as created by Skraper?
Examples:
<gamedir>/media/images
<gamedir>/media/wheel
<gamedir>/media/marquee
<gamedir>/media/steamgrid
etc

I used to scrape with Universal XML Scraper V2 but I switched to Skraper as I like the UI and process management better, but it doesn't use (to my knowledge) the <game>-<suffix>.jpg format

Thanks!

fluffypillow

@geekob yeah I really should add support for that. It's a pain opening directories with several thousand assets...

There's one corner case I'm afraid of is how should assets be recognized for games in subdirectories. Like, let's say I have /game.rom and /subdir/game.rom. Then, when checking for assets and there's a /media/game.png and /media/subdir/game.png, it's clear which asset belongs to which game. With subfolder support for media, there could be files like /media/whatever/something/game.png -- to which of the games should this asset belong then?

Of course, there's also the choice of making some drastic changes like replacing the whole logic with something entirely different/new. I'm open to ideas/comments about this topic too.

GeekOB

@fluffypillow I understand your concern, I'm not sure if that is the case with Skraper though.
EmulationStation displays the assets correctly, I don't see why Pegasus wouldn't?

Skraper defaults to <gamedir> then creates a media folder with subfolders for the different types of media, all the files within those folders have the same name as the rom file.
For example:

arcade/
├─ game1.rom
├─ game2.rom
├─ game3.rom
└─ media/
.....└─ images/ (this folder content is actually being recognized by Pegasus)
.........├─game1.jpg
.........├─ game2.jpg
.........└─ game3.jpg
.....└─ wheel/
..........├─game1.jpg
..........├─ game2.jpg
..........└─ game3.jpg

Would this pattern match all games/platforms in your experience?

fluffypillow

@geekob So I was thinking a bit more about this issue...

The way asset searching implemented currently is to go trough the files in media and decide the asset's type based on the additional suffix, and the game it belongs to based on the hierarchy of the files, which matches the game dir's.

The way you propose is to have a layer or directories for each asset type under media, decide the assets's type based on which of these "main directories" the file is, and the game based on the hierarchy inside each of these main directories.

Both ways are fine on their own, with different pros and cons. Mixing them will likely not end up well though, in my opinion, as well as being error prone and way too many corner cases to take care of. So we should choose one then; I think

The first one is easier to manage per-game, as all the assets for an game are in the same directory, so you can select/move/edit them together. It is plain simple to use (ie. drop into media and done) and the files usually clearly match exactly one game. On the other hand, the suffixes can be annoying/ugly and not always clearly decideable (eg. things like when a game is called as a suffix). The media dir is also unorganized and can end up with a large amount of files (also taking more time to open).
The second one is better organized, with the asset subdirs and the hierarchy in them looking up games is also easy and always clear. The suffixes don't clutter the file names, so loading times could be a tiny amount faster (the suffix guesswork can be removed). On the other hand if I want to modify all files for a game (eg. because I renamed the rom), I have to visit each asset dir one by one. The files also have the same name in the different directories so they can't be just copied directly into a common folder.

Based on this I'm actually leaning towards option #2 (less code + performance yay!), but I'd be happy to hear the opinion of others.

Also, just a crazy late night idea, but another option could be to have a directory for each game, which would then contain the different kind of assets. It would provide fast lookup for games, readable file names and easy editing. It'd be totally incompatible with the current scrapers though, but that wouldn't be hard to fix with a script. Well, at least this is just an idea.

On another topic, the keyboard layout changing might be simpler than I thought, it might come in the next update.

(sorry for the long post, it's late and I should probably sleep already)

GeekOB

@fluffypillow thanks, I wish I could take credit for option #2 but it's the way that Skraper organizes all the media, I "migrated" from the suffix-naming method because I liked the former better.
Pegasus looks amazing and I can see it can only get better. Once again, thank you for your disposition to receive feedback and the attention to detail.