EmulationStation mod

InsecureSpike

i know i've asked this in the past, but as a theme maker, please please remove or make that white middle carousel bar or make it editable, and make art viewable in folders too please,

i'd gladly test out your build, if you wanna share an img

lilbud

@InsecureSpike I wonder what could be done without that carousel.......(Insert evil laugh here)

InsecureSpike

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

@InsecureSpike I wonder what could be done without that carousel.......(Insert evil laugh here)

lol..... for me its just so annoying, i know its not a huge thing, but i'd love to see it rid of

lilbud

@InsecureSpike I'd love to see something like retrofx done.

ben_thatmustbeme

@jacobfk20 I think putting grid view option in the theme config makes the most sense there. Or are themes pretty good at switching between the two?

What do you say to working together on one repo? I don't think we should divide our efforts. I renamed to PieStation just to separate a little logically from the growing pile of ES forks. Like I said, add I get time ill try to merge your changes in to my fork too.

mattrixk

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

I wonder what could be done without that carousel.......(Insert evil laugh here)

I figured something like this would be awesome:

system_view

With the Systems/Consoles listed like the gameslist. I like being able to see more of them at once.

SimonBelmont

@lilbud Do you know if retrofx is open source? I tried googling it but came up with a project that overrides graphics and sounds in ROMS instead of that launcher. I wanted to create a launcher using JavaFX too and I'm just curious to see how this guy did it.

The idea of coding in Java for the Pi is so much more appealing to me because you can compile on a PC and just upload the .jar files to the Pi, taking just a few seconds. Vs the 17 hours it's supposed to take to compile EmulationStation's C code...

jacobfk20

@SimonBelmont On the pi3 it only takes about an hour to compile ES from scratch. Then after you have it built it will only recompile what has been changed. Build time is usually only twenty seconds for me. :)

@InsecureSpike Making System View more customizable would be nice. I may look into that in the future.

@ben_thatmustbeme I don't mind working together. I'll take a look at your fork as I'm looking through Retropie's fork. I'm currently getting up to date with Retropie's latest.

SimonBelmont

@jacobfk20 Well that's not bad at all then. As I mentioned in my first post, I was in the process of downloading the EmulationStation code just as you announced your version. I was in dependency hell, trying to find them all and download them. I kind of hate myself for saying this, but C needs a Maven equivalent. After I saw you had already done most of what I wanted to do I just gave up and downloaded your version :)

One feature you haven't added yet that I definitely wanted is to replace the XML "database" with a real database system. I think performance would greatly improve for people with large libraries.

ben_thatmustbeme

@SimonBelmont interesting idea. I added it to github (https://github.com/dissolve/PieStation/issues/11) just so we keep track of all these ideas. Likewise if anyone has any other things they want to note, please do so

meleu

@ben_thatmustbeme said in EmulationStation mod:

if anyone has any other things they want to note, please do so

did you see this thread?
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/177/emulationstation-feature-requests-here

herb_fargus

@SimonBelmont if you look at the retropie fork there is a branch with a sqlite backend instead of xmls. Still needs testing but it's there if you want somewhere to start

SimonBelmont

@herb_fargus I will definitely check that out. Thanks!

InsecureSpike

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

@InsecureSpike I'd love to see something like retrofx done.

well, could defo be looked into! or get something very close. especiallly if xml gets replaced somehow????

lilbud

@SimonBelmont From what I have seen. RetroFX died with the old forum. Nothing but concept art. But I wonder if that could now be achieved with this ES

lilbud

@herb_fargus What is the difference between xml and sql?

SimonBelmont

@lilbud XML is a verbose data format. Because it is verbose it is easy for humans to read and understand, as far as data files go.

SQL is not a format, but rather a language that you use to look up information in a database. A database in its simplest can be thought of like a dictionary. Each row of data has indexes that allow you to more or less jump straight to it. Like if you want to look up "zebra" you know to jump to the back of the dictionary. You don't have to look at every word from A-Y beforehand.

XML is not ordered in any particular way. So if you wanted to find "zebra" it might be the first word, the last word, or any word in between! Worse than that, you first have to read in the whole XML file and load the contents in memory to be able to walk through the data. As you load more and more data into an XML file it takes longer to read, takes up more memory, and takes longer to walk through it and find data. Whereas with a database, whether you have one row of data or a million, the amount of memory it uses and the amount of time to find data remains fairly constant.

herb_fargus

@SimonBelmont well not to split hairs but technically xml would be a language too as it stands for extensible markup language ;)

SimonBelmont

@herb_fargus Well you got me there. But the only time I would really consider XML a language is when it's an Ant script. :)

ben_thatmustbeme

@SimonBelmont definitely a language. But everything you said is accurate for any plaintext file. XML, html, yaml, CSV. It's really just a matter of plaintext format vs binary format. Binary let's you do things like jump around the file, create indexes, etc. But you sacrifice the ability to easily edit it by a simple text editor. There are other things like,you need to have more tooling for SQL (though that's arguable). Then there are problems of SQL version updates require database updates.

I wonder if it's realistic to use XML as the canonical format and then just do an md5 of the file. If the file has changed since last time ES ran, you parse it and rebuild the SQL db. It's a bit more work and a little slower on those initial loads, but does get benefits of both options.