Compound game extensions aren't detected by EmulationStation

[rilight]

Hi! I'm currently setting up pico-8 in EmulationStation and have come across a strange issue. Trying to use .p8.png files as an extension in my custom system definition results in nothing showing up in the menu, while it works if I rename them to .p8 files. However, this causes issues where within pico-8 the games do not have cover art (which is undesirable). I've searched the forum for mentions of this issue, but most of the responses seem to be "make a manual list" or "rename the file" instead of figuring out how to solve the cause in EmulationStation. Any advice?

[mitu]

I think your definition for the Pico-8 system may be wrong. How did you add it to es_systems.cfg ?

[rilight]

I added the following to /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg:

  <system>
    <name>pico8</name>
    <fullname>PICO-8</fullname>
    <path>/home/pi/.lexaloffle/pico-8/carts/games</path>
    <extension>.sh .p8 .p8.png .SH .P8 .P8.PNG</extension>
    <command>/home/pi/pico-8-shim.sh "%ROM%"</command>
    <platform>pico8</platform>
    <theme>pico8</theme>
  </system>

(For reference, pico-8-shim.sh is just a simple bash script that runs the argument directly if it is another bash script or runs pico8 -run %ROM% otherwise. This lets me have an entry to launch pico-8 to splore, for example.)

[mitu]

Use .png as the ROM file extension and it should work.

[rilight]

Sorry for the delay, I got called away. I suppose I can do that, as long as I'm careful to never save any non-game png files in that directory... it still seems odd that ES can't simply parse extensions with periods in them.

[rilight]

@mitu I just tried changing the files to simply have the .png extension, and it doesn't work. Pico-8 relies on the .p8.png extension in order to detect which files are images, and which are ROM files to show in the splore interface. In order for this to work, the cause in EmulationStation will need to be found and fixed.

[mitu]

I just tried changing the files to simply have the .png extension, and it doesn't work.

I can't reproduce this - what version of EmulationStation are you using ?

[rilight]

The problem after renaming the file isn't that it's not shown in the EmulationStation menu - it does. It's that naming a cartridge file name.png instead of name.p8.png is fundamentally incompatible with how pico-8 handles its SPLORE environment, where you can choose between cartridges to play and/or edit. Files that only end in .png are not shows as cartridges in this environment, since pico-8 expects .p8.png files.

[mitu]

@rilight I understood the .p8.png requirement. What I said is that using .png as supported extension works in EmulationStation - the .p8.png game files are displayed in the gamelist.

[rilight]

...Whoops. I somehow thought you were saying the files needed to be renamed as well. Doing it that way is a bit better, the only problem is then all games display as "name.p8" in the menu.

[mitu]

@rilight That's not an issue - most games are renamed during scraping or the info can be edited with the metadata editor (press Select on a game entry and you can edit the name that appears in the list). You can also edit the gamelist.xml directly (exit EmulationStation first) and add <name></name> entries to it to be shown in the game list.

[BuZz]

@rilight add a gamelist.xml with full names etc?

[rilight]

Oh great, thank you! This is my first real try with using RetroPie so I'm not familiar with some of how it works 😄