Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

Weekly update! Or rather, I just had some free time today, so I've finished the LaunchBox support I've started last time. It should mostly work: finds games, launches games, shows assets. However it's highly untested and off by default, but feel free to try it!

Known issues:

Pegasus looks for LaunchBox under C:\Users\<username>\LaunchBox. Yes, I know it's very likely to have it installed somewhere else, but because LB is portable it's not possible to know its location (and as far as I know it doesn't write its path to the registry either). Ideally there would be a settings panel for changing this in Pegasus in the future. If you have experience with symlinks/junctions on Windows, you can use them as a workaround.
Sometimes images have a different extensions that what they really are (eg. a PNG file is called JPG). Due to a bug in one of the components, these images fail to load. This should be fixed eventually.
The code is not fully optimized for speed yet, in theory there might be some slowness when loading large datasets.

sergioad

@fluffypillow The Hori pokken pro pad (my favorite retro style USB gamepad) is not working correctly, the east face button and the R button are not working

My recommended setup for it is east = accept, south = cancell west = favorite, north the remaining face button action (AKA the Nintendo layout) L = page back, R = next page, ZL = left trigger, ZR = right trigger and then select and start alt text

fluffypillow

Pi 4 update! So it turned out the previous releases don't work on the Pi 4 due to the video driver changes, but after some porting I've managed to build a compatible version that actually starts up. It's now available on the website too. Haven't done too much (any) testing yet with actual games though, but if it looks good, I'll also update the RetroPie script next week.

msheehan79

@fluffypillow is it possible to reference the same game file(s) from multiple metadata collection files?

I was trying to create a setup utilizing Neo Geo as 2 separate collections that share the same roms, the only difference being different launch commands that included different RetroArch config files and parameters so I could set up one collection as AES and the other for MVS by default. So I have created 2 different metadata files, one per Collection.

What I noticed was if I only loaded one metadata file it worked fine for that collection, but as soon as I tried loading Pegasus with both collection metadata files the log file was filled with entries like the below, and it did not work as expected.

2019-07-14T02:17:36 [w] Game 'Example 1' does not belong to any collections, ignored

It ended up with both of the collection tabs reading from one of the 2 config files instead of one per collection as expected so no matter if I chose the AES or MVS version of Neo Geo, it is always launching the AES launch command.

I'm not sure if this is not a supported feature or if it is a bug, or maybe I am just doing something wrong... could you just let me know if this is a feature that should work? If so I am happy to provide more specifics or if you have an example or two of a working setup that references the same game files from multiple metadata files I would love to see it so I can try & figure out where things have gone sideways on me!

fluffypillow

@msheehan79 Yes, games can appear in more than one collection, but different launch commands don't really work at the moment -- which actually would be a logical feature to add; I'll see if I can implement it tomorrow!

I can also take a look on the metadata files if you upload them, that feature should work as is. By the way if you have exactly the same games in both collections, you can just put both collection sections into the same file too, without duplicating the game data.

ryuuji

I did not know where elese to ask so I ll ask here ...
How can I make the gameOS theme use boxFront instead of screenshot/video in the grid menu ?

fluffypillow

@ryuuji perhaps you're looking for this thread? I think you might need to edit the theme, you can find its sources here.

PlayingKarrde

@ryuuji I'm going to do some work on gameOS today. I will look into adding options and make this one of them.

ryuuji

@fluffypillow sorry should have looked better

@PlayingKarrde that sound awesome :) thank you

msheehan79

@fluffypillow Thanks for the response on this. I haven't had much time this week to dig into this more, but I think the biggest issue I had was the single launch command per game. Knowing that isn't supported currently I just made 2 folders for the roms for the 2 systems. If I need to save a few GB of space I could always make one of the folders a symlink to the other so it ultimately points to the same files.

To be honest outside of the Neo Geo AES/MVS scenario I cannot think of too many other scenarios where you would have different launch commands for the same ROM so it's probably not a huge issue. Depending on how difficult of a feature it is too add it may fall into the "too obscure to be worth the effort" category!

sergioad

This post is deleted!

sergioad

@sergioad said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@fluffypillow The Hori pokken pro pad (my favorite retro style USB gamepad) is not working correctly, the east face button and the R button are not working

My recommended setup for it is east = accept, south = cancell west = favorite, north the remaining face button action (AKA the Nintendo layout) L = page back, R = next page, ZL = left trigger, ZR = right trigger and then select and start

@fluffypillow could you please add compatibility with the Hori Pokken pro pad for Pegasus FE?

fluffypillow

@sergioad there are various gamepads that don't work well at the moment, but improving that is one of the next things I plan to work on.

sergioad

@fluffypillow thank you very much

AndersHP

@fluffypillow

I have 2 questions for you:

Is there a way to move dummy-roms up to the top of the gamelist? Previously I had the figure "0" in the dummy rom name, but now the games are sorted by their actual names. Any way to force the game up?
I cannot code Shift and Ctrl buttons to "filter" and "launch menu" commands. Is this possible to implement?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP games with multiple files are now also supported, which is why they are now ordered by their title in the main theme. Maybe adding a small mark like ' or * to the titles could work? Themes can also sort the games in whatever way they'd like to, so editing the main theme would also work.

I cannot code Shift and Ctrl buttons to "filter" and "launch menu" commands. Is this possible to implement?

Hm if I remember correctly there were some input issues when there were bindings using Ctrl/Shift/Alt both on their own and in a combination. It should be possible, but may need some work.

TimBroddin

Hi @fluffypillow,

Thanks for this amazing frontend. I'm having an issue with my 8Bitdo SF30 Pro controller. Sometimes (without apparent cause) the gamelist freezes and switches between two games. If this happens I can press start and exit just fine.

I've made a movie the last time this happened:

If you want me to create a Github issue about this please say so.

Tim

fluffypillow

@TimBroddin Hi, thanks for the video! Does this happen with other devices (eg. keyboard)? It seems you're using @PlayingKarrde 's theme, does this happen using the default theme too? Did this happen on earlier versions (if you've tried Pegasus before)?

TimBroddin

@fluffypillow thanks for the quick reply!

It also happens when using the default theme. It actually happened the very first time I started Pegasus :) I can't compare to previous versions because I'm a new user.

When it happens and I launch the selected game, the behavior is still there when it returns to Pegasus.

I hasn't ever happened while using keyboard only, it usually happens after I push a button (up, down, shoulder buttons) on the gamepad.

Since restarting Pegasus fixes it, a "Restart Pegasus" option in the Quit menu would be a handy workaround.

fluffypillow

@TimBroddin hm I wonder if it's gamepad related, like many other issues, or something else. I plan to update the gamepad handling in the near future, maybe that will have a positive effect.