How do I supply an argument to EmulationStation as it's booting

footwo

Hi

I'm trying to develop a fairly closed system that people cannot accidentally break and as such I don't want "Exit EmulationStation" to be shown on the Quit menu from within the GUI. This can be achieved using the argument '--no-exit' but I can't find where retropie invokes emulationstation during boot up.

Can anyone please assist?

Thanks.

meleu

@footwo What I did to achieve it:
Edit the file /usr/bin/emulationstation (it's a shell script). The last line of this file invokes emulationstation with this command:

"/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh" "$@"

I changed it to:

"/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation.sh" --no-exit "$@"

I hope it helps.

BuZz

On retropie 4 you can edit /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh. changes in the the es launch script will get overwritten on upgrade.

footwo

@BuZz This is how I ended up doing it.

There's a small issue whereby if someone exits via F4 to the terminal, on their return they will see and "Exit Emulation Station" option, but I can live with that.

I've tried using the branch of ES that has Kiosk/Kid mode but it runs far too slowly at the moment. On regular ES (with metadata settings turned off) using an almost full 32GB card I get in fairly quickly, whereas using the other branch takes quite some time.

@meleu Shouldn't your arg be inside the inverted commas? ie. ".../emulationstation.sh --no-exit"

meleu

@footwo said in How do I supply an argument to EmulationStation as it's booting:

@meleu Shouldn't your arg be inside the inverted commas? ie. ".../emulationstation.sh --no-exit"

I tested exactly the same way as I posted, and it worked. But, as BuZz said, edit the /usr/bin/emulationstation file is not the best choice. It'll be overwritten after an ES update.

footwo

Well, thanks anyway all, I've managed to get it working.

Word of warning btw if you ever try that ES "kiosk/kid mode" branch, when you uninstall it, it gets rid of the whole of emulation station :(

Still, looking forward to how that branch progresses.