grid view frontend for vertical cocktail table?
-
Hello all,
I've been working for a couple of years on a retropie cocktail arcade table. For the frontend I've been using emulationstation with the RetroHursty69/es-theme-vertical_arcade theme which has worked fine while I was building everything else.
My last major project (I think) is to build or find a good grid-view frontend that works well in vertical mode. I feel like choosing from screenshot images is way better than words (and is better for kids that can't read just yet). My ideal solution would be very simple: screenshots as images placed in a clean grid that fills the screen with the name of the game under the screen shot.
So far I've been unable to find something that fills that need. It seems like grid-view in emulationstation doesn't work particularly well (especially in vertical layout). I was excited when I found pegasus-fe + gameOS, but pegasus does not have a screen rotate option. I've toyed with rotating the screen at the OS-level, but on rpi3 this causes serious perf issues and I'm not sure anyone has figured out how to do this on an rpi4 with or without perf issues.
I'm hoping something exists out there, so I'd love to hear if anyone feels like there is an existing option. Otherwise, I may jump in and start building one myself. That could take many forms, including working on a pegasus fork that adds a rotate/vertical layout option, or jumping into emulationstation to see if I can get a gridview to work well, or ... start something new?
Thoughts? Am I missing something that already exists? If not, any suggestions on where to apply my coding effort if I go that route?
Jonathan
-
@jgeibel Do you know Attract-Mode? It's completely programmable in a cute little language called Squirrel, and it should support screen rotation. You can install it from RetroPie's experimental packages section.
-
@clyde I have -- wasn't sure if it was rotatable or had any grid view type support. Will check it out again -- if they have the rotation maybe I can build a vertical grid theme for it
-
@clyde Alright, this worked pretty well! Thanks for the suggestion. Got it loaded and rotated. Loaded up some roms and screenshots. Changed to Grid Layout. Lots more tweaking to do, but initial test seemed pretty good. Curious if there are any themes out there that can handle a vertical grid mode. Will poke around to see what I can find.
-
@jgeibel My pleasure. Some years ago, I used AM on my Linux PC and laptop before I got my Pi 3b and discovered RetroPie, which seduced me with its all-in-one-package simplicity.
But I still have my MAME 0.185 setup with AM, and I'll never forget this my "first love" among emulation frontends with its unparalleled customisability. 😍
Contributions to the project are always appreciated, so if you would like to support us with a donation you can do so here.
Hosting provided by Mythic-Beasts. See the Hosting Information page for more information.