Announcing Pegasus Frontend

[Magma]

@mitu I rebooted the Retropie and reconfigured the controller. Loaded a game and confirmed it was working.

Exited EmulationStation and loaded Pegasus. Launched a game. Controller works fine in the front end but still does not work at all once a game is launched.

Here is the pastebin of the log. https://pastebin.com/X4DnRkLn

Looks like the same issue.

[mitu]

@Magma I think I know what's the issue - you're running Pegasus as root or via sudo, while Emulationstation runs as the user pi. As a consequence, the auto-configuration folder - where the gamepad configs are stored - are different.
Don't run Pegasus as root / via sudo - it's not advisable and it will break other configurations also.

[AndersHP]

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@carlhungus74 @AndersHP the playback volume is based on the system's main volume. I think it'd be possible to change that with eg. amixer when Pegasus starts up or launches a game.

But wouldn't lowering the main volume lower the volume in the games also, so the issue will remain the same?

[Magma]

@mitu Perfect that did the trick. Thanks so much.

[fluffypillow]

@AndersHP You could work around that by first reducing the volume before Pegasus starts, raising when a game is launched (by eg. writing a game-start script), reducing again when you return from a game (game-end), and finally raising again when Pegasus is closed.

Other alternatives could be changing the code of the theme to play the videos less loud, or changing videos themselves (eg. some kind of volume normalization), though I haven't tried that yet.

[Magma]

Ok new question. I want to play around with what images Pegasus uses. Originally I was using the setting from EmulationStation. I went and converted my gamelist.xml's to Pegasus' metadata.txt using https://pegasus-frontend.org/tools/convert/. I then disabled EmulationStation in the list of data sources.

After relaunching Pegasus 0 games were found. I believe this is because there is no Collection info at the top of the metadata.txt in each rom folder. Here is an example of the top of one metadata.txt https://pastebin.com/LUiMPWX0

I'm not sure how to configure it correctly to work with Retroarch. Currently only have the following systems, SNES, NES, Genesis, and FinalBurnAlpha.

[fluffypillow]

@Magma Yes, a Collection is required for the games to be found, but fortunately it's also possible to get them from EmulationStation's es_systems.cfg too. Here's a guide I've wrote for a similar case, hope this helps.

[jerzeeloon]

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@jerzeeloon there have been reports of slow USB access, but it seems to be depending on the device. Do you see anything out of order in the log file (<storage>/pegasus-frontend/lastrun.log)?

Sorry it took so long to get back to you but nothing strange in the last run log. Seems dependant on the sheer amount ROMs/assets on initial load. I decreased the amount of ROMs by a few thousand it loaded quicker just doesn't seem like any advantage in speed between a standard USB hdd and my Samsung T5 SSD. That said I can live with the initial load time when taking into consideration that I have boxart, screenshots, fanart, logos and videos in addition to thousands of ROMs it's probably a lot to mull over. What's important is that once in the frontend when I exit an emulator to pick another game the front end pops right back up. So again I appreciate all your work and continued support especially for the Android system, definitely my favorite frontend even in this alpha stage. Also recently got an odroid n2. Would be awesome if I can get it to run on that as well.

[Magma]

@fluffypillow Thanks that did the trick.

I'm really enjoying Pegasus over ES but there's one last thing I'd like to get working.

Currently I'm using a Retroflag SuperPi case (http://retroflag.com/SUPERPi-CASE-U.html) and the Power and Reset buttons are functional in ES (and RecalBox) due to this script https://github.com/RetroFlag/retroflag-picase

Any ideas on how I can get similar functionality with Pegasus? Would it be as simple as changing the sudo killall emulationstation to pegasus-fe?

[fluffypillow]

@jerzeeloon That's too bad :( Hope I can improve load times in the future!

Also recently got an odroid n2. Would be awesome if I can get it to run on that as well.

Yeah it would be nice to have Odroid releases eventually. It should be possible to build Pegasus for the N2 already, but might need to do some manual setup to make everything work.

@Magma Yes, simply replacing emulationstation with pegasus-fe should work fine. You could also make it work for both the same time:

os.system("sudo killall emulationstation pegasus-fe; sleep 5s && sudo reboot")

[KryPtAlIvIaN]

Could you please explain how to launch retroarch and its core. I'm trying to configure the snes metadata.txt to launch the game, but I'm not having any luck. I would think the android example would be different since they're not the same OS.

[AndersHP]

@fluffypillow
Seems like a lot of work to change the code with scripts that way, and editing all videos will be a ton of work.

Seems like the theme-based volume adjustment would be the best solution. Can a non-coder do this (fairly easy)?

[fluffypillow]

@KryPtAlIvIaN Sure,

• On RetroPie, using Runcommand the format is

  /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ <systemname> "{file.path}"
  

  eg. in the case of SNES, the launch command would be

  /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ snes "{file.path}"
  

• On desktop Linux/Windows/macOS the format is

  "/path/to/retroarch" -L "/path/to/core" "{file.path}"
  

  for example,

  "C:\retroarch\retroarch.exe" -L "C:\retroarch\cores\snes9x_libretro.dll" "{file.path}"
  

  (cores are .so files on Linux/macOS)

• On Android, it's documented here (just mentioning it in case someone is looking for it).

@AndersHP It could be done I think. First download the main theme as a standalone theme, then at this location add the following line:

volume: 0.5

(the value should be between 0.0 and 1.0). Then select this downloaded and edited theme in Pegasus' settings menu, and the volume should change.

[AndersHP]

Cool, thanks.
I'm backing up my entire setup, so is it not possible to just edit the PanelRight.qml file directly from the pi?

[fluffypillow]

@AndersHP Sure, but you still have to download it first. You can

cd ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/themes/
wget https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-theme-grid/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip
nano pegasus-theme-grid-master/layer_gameinfo/PanelRight.qml

and edit the file there.

[KryPtAlIvIaN]

Quick question. If someone wanted to use an xbox one controller with pegasus, would it have native support or require you to do something like exit and launch emulationstation to program the controller and hotkey?

Thanks!

[fluffypillow]

@KryPtAlIvIaN While it should work out of the box in Pegasus, the emulators unfortunately won't pick up the gamepad configuration yet. At the moment it is still necessary to configure in EmulationStation too.

[KryPtAlIvIaN]

@fluffypillow Thanks!

[KryPtAlIvIaN]

@KryPtAlIvIaN said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@fluffypillow Thanks!

If someone used a wired switch controller, they could get it to work by configuring it with emulation station first, and then pegasus will read the same config file?

Some of these questions I ask, I don't mind making up a Q&A for your site since you already took the time to answer these.

[fluffypillow]

@KryPtAlIvIaN No, Pegasus doesn't read ES's input config files, it would be necessary to configure it in both programs.

Generally gamepad support is not really perfect at the moment, I'd like to improve it in the future (it's just a bit complicated with so many platforms). Eventually support for sharing the button config with the emulators would be also possible (and maybe with ES too).

I'm fine with a Q&A, just note that Pegasus is still under development so things may change quickly :)