Announcing Pegasus Frontend

Cybrasty

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

It uses Qt, which I've built to use EGL on the Raspberry Pi, ie. X11 is not required, it can run with or without it. Other than that there are releases for desktop Linux (X11), Windows and Android, but it can also be build for macOS, Odroid and other boards.

Any idea what keyboard tables Qt ueses? My current problem when it comes to ES2 is that it doesn't seem to read my modified linux tables so I can use my C64 keyboard correctly (which requires Shift + Down for Up and Shift + Right for Left among others).

fluffypillow

@cybrasty Never tried that personally, but apparently you can load custom X11 keymaps and kmap files to use.

Cybrasty

@fluffypillow I have made myself a custom keymap that works both in X and console, it just doesn't register in ES2 because it runs off SDL keymap (I think) which I can't find. Or the way ES2 is written it doesn't recognize Shift as a modifier that changes input.

This is why I asked about key combos, because even if Pegasus won't use my keymap, I can always fake it ;)

Just to confirm that my custom tables of Shift+key are not read in Pegasus either.
I would like to request shifted/modded key support. It would be helpful in my case, and would also allow for shortcuts like Shift/Alt F1 to reboot or close the front end.

fluffypillow

@cybrasty tested this on my Pi too, and the loadkey method indeed fails. In theory converting the kmap to qmap could make it work, but compiling the converted tool is a pain.. I think I can add key combinations support however, I'll do some experiments to see if I can make it work.

Cybrasty

@fluffypillow Thanks! I am looking forward to it :)

I think the big issue here is how fractured linux keyboard is. There is one driver for X, another for console, and bunch of other library specific drivers that do or do not follow whatever the distro tells them to do with custom keybindings. So even when changing everything that I could in rasbian, it still isn't enough.

Having multi-key in Pegasus will save me a lot of hassle of trying to build my own keyboard controller.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I'm in the middle of sorting arcade games and threw them all in the .../roms/arcade/fba/ and .../roms/arcade/mame-libretro folders and screenshots and logos aren't showing up. The box art does show up since that's dependent on the gamelist.xml. Putting games in .../roms/arcade/ also doesn't make the screenshots/logo art show. This is odd because my custom system folders have no issues.

All of my scraped arcade art is in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/arcade.
The same screenshot and logo art will show up if I put it in .../downloaded_images/fba/ or .../downloaded_images/mame-libretro/ but I'd need to put games in the ...roms/fba and ...roms/mame-libretro/ rom folders again. This verifies the art is good.

Also, will you be providing a non-internal version of the default theme? I wish to add/replace some of the system logos. I already did that to the simple theme. While the simple theme has bugs displaying some system logos, replacing the .svg does work.

Also, this overlapping box art bug has existed for the longest but wonder if anything can be done. Going to the next or previous system and then back to this one causes it and fixes it.
This is build alpha9-55-gfb13c3d. 2018-10-08

fluffypillow

@Darksavior this is partly a bug and also an interesting case. When looking for assets, it was assumed that the games were stored as /path/to/<systemname>/game, and assets as /path/to/downloaded_images/<systemname>/game. The bug is that the case when the <systemname> part in these two differs was not handled, I'll fix it. Other than that, assets for system x are always searched under downloaded_images/x/, as it cannot be guessed that they should be searched in some other directory.

Also, will you be providing a non-internal version of the default theme?

Yes, I'll likely move it into a separate repo, for license reasons too (ie. no company logos in the main repo).

Also, this overlapping box art bug has existed for the longest but wonder if anything can be done.

Yeah, the main theme would need some love too. It will be fixed, along with the portrait/landscape ugliness eventually.

fluffypillow

As for this week's update, there have been a bunch of bugfixes:

Fixed console apps not reacting to keyboard input (eg. Retropie menu)
Fixed after-process scripts called too soon
Fixed an issue where changing the theme didn't work after a theme loading error
Fixed asset searching in ES2's downloaded_images when the name of the game directory didn't match the system name
Fixed the data source settings panel not reacting properly to keyboard input

Key combination support is in the works, it seems I can add support for it.
Also updated the changelog in the first post.

Purg.Derren

Hi there! First of all, i love the new media detection way! Already reorganized my media directory, but my question is, how do i handle in Pegasus multi-disc games? (w/o using ES2) ...in ES2 i had same "problem" first, used there a subfolder and <folder> node in the gamelist.xml to add boxArt to the folder etc
Is there a way to add smth like a "sub-collection", inside a collection ?

fluffypillow

@purg-derren hmm not sure how to deal with that case, it feels kind of halfway between the frontend and the emulator's territory. I've heard some emulators can handle M3U files where you list the disk files, that'd be an ideal solution I think. Or if the emulator can't handle it, maybe a small launcher app that'd read and present it with some simple UI instead.

msheehan79

HI @fluffypillow - I’ve been keeping an eye on this project for some time and finally had a chance to install it on a Windows PC to check it out. It really is great! I love the clean UI and how smooth and fast it runs, and you’ve taken a lot of steps to make this a super flexible front end as well.

Can your parser support reading additional data from ES2 files if for example I added “launch” as a node there to set up per game launch commands, or added additional custom metadata using the x-prefix as you support in the regular metdata files?

fluffypillow

@msheehan79 well the ES2 support is there mainly for compatibility, so I'd rather not add new features to the files that ES2 itself doesn't support. If a new node type becomes official on their side though, then yeah, support could be added after that.

msheehan79

@fluffypillow yes that does make sense, thanks for replying. Just so I am not missing anything, is there any supported method to set per game launch commands while still using the ES2 metadata or is the only option to switch to the metadata.txt format and add there?

I’m sure I can convert my files, just want to make sure I haven’t missed an option before I go that route.

Thanks!

fluffypillow

@msheehan79 there's no support for that in ES2's files I'm afraid, all games are run with the command set in the systems config. As for the conversion, this online tool might help with that too.

fluffypillow

I have an experimental macOS build, could someone try if it actually works? You can get it here.

msheehan79

@fluffypillow Ok thanks again! I did see the conversion tool too.

The reason for my question was because I have all of my gamelist files in MS Excel spreadsheets that I can export into the ES2 XML format pretty easily. I found the scraped data tended to be hit or miss so I had imported the XML gamelist files into Excel, then manually corrected and curated it there, where it is much easier to work with the data and format/filter/sort it etc and exporting it back into XML is a simple process.

I spent a bit of time this evening and wrote up a very quick VBA script that should work to export from my Excel metadata into the Pegasus TXT file format, while also allowing me to add in the launch node so I can set up the custom launch scripts for the games that need it. I'm sure it'll need a few more tweaks but it should provide a nice and simple solution to allow keeping the metadata in a spreadsheet for easier updates and additions, and I can just export the updated metadata for Pegasus as needed.

lazd

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

I have an experimental macOS build, could someone try if it actually works?

macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 (17C89) x86_64

I fired it up and got the following:

QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
qrc:/frontend/main.qml:19 module "QtQuick" is not installed
qrc:/frontend/main.qml:20 module "QtQuick.Window" is not installed
qrc:/frontend/main.qml:19 module "QtQuick" is not installed
qrc:/frontend/main.qml:20 module "QtQuick.Window" is not installed

This didn't seem to register as a fatal error, as the application stayed open, but with no window displayed. I quit it, then installed QT with brew install qt5, which also installs QtQuick to /usr/local/Cellar/qt/5.11.2/qml/QtQuick/. I relaunched the application and got the same error.

Let me know if you'd like me to try anything else or have a fresh build to try!

fluffypillow

@lazd Thanks! Let's see if I can fix it...

fluffypillow

Ok, here's another Mac build. This should be working, optimized, Retina-friendly and also have proper icons. It's here.

PlayingKarrde

I just came across Pegasus and have to say it might be exactly what I've been looking for. At first glance it looks like it has all the features of a launcher I want and I'm happy to see it's still in active development.

I've been looking for a launcher to create a theme for and based on what I'm seeing I think I'm going to take a crack at Pegasus. I do have a couple of questions first though: first is it appears to me that performance maybe quite poor right now or is that just me? I'm mainly talking about the selection of games as I notice there is a bit of stutter on the animations as it switches selection. If there's something I can do to correct this I'd really appreciate it.

Secondly, I'm trying to run it in portable mode in order to easily work with the theme but it doesn't appear to be creating a config file within the install dir. I'm simply running it with the --portable flag but it appears to continue to use the UserData folder. Is there something I'm missing?

Anyway great work and if I continue to pursue the theme after digging deeper in I'll post my progress.

-edit-

OK I think I just answered my own questions. I just need to create my own config/themes/ folder for the second question. I noticed once I installed the ES2 theme that performance was improved so I'm wondering if either the default theme is heavy of if the stuttering is happening due to it trying to load video that isn't there (when I cycle between games it is displaying a screenshot for a split second before showing a grey box on top).