Updated EmulationStation for Windows

f.caruso

Hi everyone,

It's been a while... but I want to keep you informed that I released a new version today of my EmulationStation 2.10c fcamod.

This release in mainly focused on having a perfect & animated grid view, theming, and videos, and solving bugs. I also focused on backward compatibility for themes.

The changelog is pretty long. For example : you can now design custom views, inherited from integrated views, and choose which view to apply, either globally or by system. Also, theming system is now fully compatible with Recalbox themes.

You can download and see source code here :
https://github.com/fabricecaruso/EmulationStation/releases

You can also download a complete pack including my theme, which demonstrates all the new possibilities here :
http://fabrice.caruso.free.fr/EmulationStationMod.7z

Also, I made a video to demonstrate the new grid possibilities. I forgot to capture a system with a video background... but it works... Never mind you can test it using "DVD Boxes #2" in my theme. You can see the video here :

I didn't document yet the new Theming possibilities, but, promise, I will soon.

@mitu I archived my code and rebased it. Even if I work under Windows / Visual Studio, my code should compile and work perfectly under Linux & Pi. I saw you validated a MR recently on github, so i'm wondering... Are you interested in merging my work that in the main Retropie repo ? Do you think I should push a MR ? Please contact me if you are interested ( as an admin, you certainly can see my email ).

A Former User

Holy moly that's a lot of progress.

Any chance the alphabetical sorting issue was solved?

f.caruso

@LiveFastCyYoung said in Updated EmulationStation for Windows:

Any chance the alphabetical sorting issue was solved?

It is. Isn't it ?
The video continuing playing when running a game too....

A Former User

@f-caruso I'm not at home so I can't test it until later. I'll certainly report back though. Thanks! :)

PittStone

@f-caruso The "Magazin Madness Theme have now pixelated Covers on Main Menue. After set "preload UI" to off, the pixelate is gone. Please check it out.

mitu

@f-caruso said in Updated EmulationStation for Windows:

https://github.com/fabricecaruso/EmulationStation/releases

Looks like great work !

@mitu I archived my code and rebased it. Even if I work under Windows / Visual Studio, my code should compile and work perfectly under Linux & Pi.

It compiles fine under Linux. Didn't get a chance to do it on a Pi yet.

I saw you validated a MR recently on github, so i'm wondering... Are you interested in merging my work that in the main Retropie repo ? Do you think I should push a MR ? Please contact me if you are interested ( as an admin, you certainly can see my email ).

I'm just a casual contributor to Emulationstation - my PR's have been so far just small bugfixes - I don't have commit rights. @pjft, @jdrassa (which fork you forked) and @Tomaz are the main maintainers of the repository.

As a RetroPie contributor, I think some of your changes could benefit everyone - not just Windows users - and we could gain by adding your changes:

The Grid View changes
L10n is an request voiced here - there's a starting PR by @nadenislamarre, the main Batocera developer and several forks which implemented it.
Windows fixes - a lot of 'orphaned' Emulationstation Win users find their way to this topic, after they realise that emulationstation.org is dormant.
I'm sure there are more small fixes and optimisations in your fork.

For integrating those changes into the main RetroPie version, I still think a series of MR/PR (focused on a certain functionality) is the way to go - but that's up to repo's maintainers. I can certainly test things - both on Linux/PI.

f.caruso

@PittStone I added a mecanism to ensure images are sized in memory to the size of their container. It saves lot of VRAM. Maybe some images are stored in different containers and the sizing is too small. I'll investigate. Maybe l'll also add an option ( deactivated by default ? ) for this mecanim (resize images on/off).

f.caruso

@mitu "a series of MR/PR focused on a certain functionality". The problem is that I changed too many things especially in base components like GuiComponent, VideoComponent, ImageComponent. It impacts almost everything... Choosing functionnalities is not going to be an easy thing... I Retropie is interested in just one or two functionnalities, better time going back from zero from their master and re-adapt code...

I honestly don't know how to do it right. I have no experience in opensourcing nor Git... And I have no contact with anyone in the Team. The best think to do is talk ;-) That's why i asked...

f.caruso

@PittStone I understood the problem. In the theme, the logo is declared multiple times in detailed, basic and video views... But it is outside the screen (see pos), and it is very small. The preloader / image resizer takes this version as a reference. I'll see if I can parse the theme to find the "biggest" container for a given image in a future release.

Meanwhile, just remove these lines in the theme ( found 3 times - not a problem as the logo is not visible on the screen ) :

<image name="logo">
         <origin>0.5 0.5</origin>
         <pos>1.5 1.125</pos>
         <maxSize>0.14 0.14</maxSize>
      </image>

mitu

@f-caruso said in Updated EmulationStation for Windows:

@mitu "a series of MR/PR focused on a certain functionality". The problem is that I changed too many things especially in base components like GuiComponent, VideoComponent, ImageComponent. It impacts almost everything... Choosing functionnalities is not going to be an easy thing... I Retropie is interested in just one or two functionnalities, better time going back from zero from their master and re-adapt code...

Yes, I see you sprinkled a lot of small additions into the a lot of files. However I see you kept the coding style, so that's a plus for future integration efforts.

I honestly don't know how to do it right. I have no experience in opensourcing nor Git... And I have no contact with anyone in the Team. The best think to do is talk ;-) That's why i asked...

Don't worry, so far - by publishing the source and adding a CI Release - you're doing ok. You might consider opening a separate topic though here in the forum :).

dukeblooders

@f-caruso Hi,

I have a new bug with the latest version. With the showcase theme (automatic view), the game image is displayed when a game is selected, and after a delay of X seconds, image is replaced by video.

Now, image is not visible anymore. I can add the tags <image name="md_image"> in <view name="video">, but image is not hidden when video starts to play.

f.caruso

@dukeblooders Looking for a soluce...

jdrassa

@f-caruso said in Updated EmulationStation for Windows:

@mitu "a series of MR/PR focused on a certain functionality". The problem is that I changed too many things especially in base components like GuiComponent, VideoComponent, ImageComponent. It impacts almost everything...

@mitu's suggestion of targeted PRs is the best approach to getting your changes merged. It makes it easier to review and test the changes independently. If you were to submit a PR for everything, it would likely just be rejected.

Choosing functionnalities is not going to be an easy thing... I Retropie is interested in just one or two functionnalities, better time going back from zero from their master and re-adapt code...

Thats essentially what needs to be done. You (or someone else) would need to start with the current RetroPie version, pick a given functionality, and reimplement it there. I know it would be a lot of work, but so is keeping your fork in sync with RetroPie. Overtime that is going to become harder to do. Especially if over functionality is added that conflicts with the changes you have made.

I honestly don't know how to do it right. I have no experience in opensourcing nor Git... And I have no contact with anyone in the Team. The best think to do is talk ;-) That's why i asked...

If you want to create PRs for RetroPie, this is what I would suggest doing.

Create a new branch in your repository to preserve all of your current work.
Update your master branch to mirror RetroPie's master
Create a new branch for the first feature that you would like to push to RetroPie. Once it is ready, submit a PR.

If you need any help with how to actually do any of the above with git/github let me know and I can post more detailed instructions.

As for what features to target, I think the highest priority ones would be the Grid View improvements and the menu theming.

Also, when modifying existing files, you should take care to preserve the existing styling to keep the diff to a minimum. For example if you look at the diff for GuiComponent, to shows that the entire file has changed, when ideally it should just show your additions. This is likely due to formatting changes. It makes it much harder to review what actually changed.

A Former User

@f-caruso said in Updated EmulationStation for Windows:

@LiveFastCyYoung said in Updated EmulationStation for Windows:

Any chance the alphabetical sorting issue was solved?

It is. Isn't it ?
The video continuing playing when running a game too....

Edit: Turns out my alphabetical sorting issue was I had a couple ROMS beginning with a space. -_-

jero

ooo this is incredible every time it takes better color. I think that this project although it is a retropie son should have its name something like RETROWIND, well it's just an idea, but it would be great. It would not be complete WINDOWS but WIND would be fine, ummmm RETROWIND hehehehehehehe. Well it's just an idea. always under retropie, which is his father hahaha.

@f-caruso I've tried the latest and I'm having problems with the videos and cover of the games. If I have view mode, list of games in Automatic only appears video in perfect position, if it is in basic nothing appears, if it is in detailed mode the image appears of the perfect box and the video is positioned in another place as you can see in the image. If I use the video mode the video in perfect position

@dukeblooders I see that the same thing happened

@f-caruso I see that he is working on it. Thanks for everything as always

f.caruso

Hi everyone,

New release 2.10.0.4 today, with a big changelist. You can see the changelog on my github.
It was focused on bugfix and optimisation. For exemple, loading time is really faster, and memory usage is really better. I added an On-Screen keyboard, Text glows, ability to override grid size globally or by system, fixed video starting time and fading, added security for gamelist.xml (sometimes the file was saved empty), reviewed SVGs sizing & loading ( Previous versions unloaded/reloaded SVGs each time a container of a different size needed to display it because of a size calculation problem, consuming disk & time ).

You still can download the Release and see source code here :
https://github.com/fabricecaruso/EmulationStation/releases

You can also download the complete pack including my personnal updated theme, which demonstrates all the new possibilities here :
http://fabrice.caruso.free.fr/EmulationStationMod.7z

@jero You problem should be fixed, and video/image fading should now be really better ( and fixed : it started at bad timing ).

@jdrassa @mitu Thanks for your answer and sorry for the delay of my answer. I updated readme.me & theme.md on my github so you can see the - almost - full changelist & documentation about the new theming possibilities.
The thing is, I'm now 50 commits ahead Retropie, and I really modified a lot of small things everywhere and most of the new features are dependant one from another. For exemple I had to modify Video, Image components for the grid, which impacted detailled view, which impacted viewcontroller... and so on...

If we have to start from retropie current master, I can give you easyly small things easyly like initial loading which is now threaded ( and much faster ), or menu theming... But it will be a very hard work to give you the GridView without doing a very big effort and a huge MR... It will be hard too if I gave to you the memory optimizations I did on FileData & Metadata storage ( very consumming - on Windows with my gamelists on my machine I saved almost 50 Mo ram use ).
For thoses big features : Better time taking my whole master, honestly !

So, I propose to you :
Either look at my changelist and tell me things you want and I'll see according to the effort needed. For the features that will not take too much effort, I'll try do it.
Either test & play with my version, and tell me exactly what you want me to fix or modify and take the whole package for Retropie... (honestly, now : the second solution will be easier to do and you'll have a real big new version for the next retropie release, containing many things people are waiting for, for so long)

A Former User

Nice! Excited to download this and give it a try this weekend!

dukeblooders

@f-caruso Hi,

I can't launch your last .exe.
Nothing happens, even if I clear my .emulationstation folder (and there's no process in the task manager).

f.caruso

@dukeblooders Redownload it, I re-uploaded it again cuz I had an error in the files

dukeblooders

@f-caruso Thanks for your work, everything works fine now.