Show Control Panel Layout before game starts in RetroPie, just like Arcade1UP does.

Texacate · 8 Nov 2019, 17:50

Sorry for the late replies. I'm not getting much hobby time these days... Feel free to reference/reuse any of my code in your projects. I'm always interested in seeing what folks do to improve it.

ImALegendKiller · 6 Nov 2019, 06:31

The work everyone is doing in this thread is impressive! I am working on my first RetroPie build and currently just going through trying to figure out how to get games running. One problem I've noticed is that I have no idea what the buttons do! In MAME I know I can just hit TAB and change the controls, but for FBA the controls seem to be all over the place, and the controls in the FBA retroarch core and the pifba are not matching up, so games I run with the pi version are hard to play.

This is all to say, I hope you all will make your results available once you finish, as it'd be sweet to get a quick glance at what the default controls were just before I jumped into a game so I'd at least have an idea of what to press and hopefully remap it if I needed to. Keep up the good work!

paffley · 6 Nov 2019, 14:19

Interesting read this! thanks!

Just a quick question...

Is there anyway to edit runcommand so it freezes and then you have an option of 'A to load game' and 'B to cancel and return to gamelist' please?

TheRealSmilebit · 8 Nov 2019, 17:50

@Texacate Thanks...I kinda hit a brick wall and walked away for this particular project for a while. Just overthinking and making it too complicated.

I did, however, use your code to make LCD Marquee. Found a 14.9" stretched monitor and added to my Arcade1up mod.

But I will get back to the original idea in the New Year. Have some other projects I need to finish up and will revisit this one.

fishman · 19 Nov 2019, 06:03

@Kjarkur
Did ever complete it?

fishman · 19 Nov 2019, 06:06

@Kjarkur said in Show Control Panel Layout before game starts in RetroPie, just like Arcade1UP does.:

@BJRetro the video shows my own regamebox distribution. I can make a fork on github.com. Of course it can be done with retropie easily. General steps are this

create the button mapping pictures in advance

put a picture viewer in runcommand-onstart.sh

I have used here a own picture viewer based on SDL. Reason was that I wanted to use something like quit on all keys and quit after 10 seconds.

Sorry I meant to quote. Did you ever make a fork of this on gethub? And how do you set this up? And have been looking for something like this for my raspberry pi retropie.

MISTERHOLLYW00D · 27 Dec 2019, 18:30

I had to edit the Joy2Key.py file to allow the user of the Start button so the player could exit the screen using the Player 1 button.

What line would you have to edit

johnodon · 26 Jun 2020, 23:01

Apologies for digging up an old topic...

@TheRealSmilebit If you are still around, can you detail what changes you made to joy2key.py that allowed you to map a single button to close the launch image and start the game? There are a few of us that would love to have this functionality!

TIA!

John

johnodon · 27 Jun 2020, 11:23

@BJRetro said in Show Control Panel Layout before game starts in RetroPie, just like Arcade1UP does.:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/20030/controller-info-overlay-in-the-game

@BJRetro I actually went this route and it works. I use 2 copies of my game specific bezels...one with a transparent background (gameplay) and one with the black background with controls. This makes the transition seamless. However, there are 2 things that make it non-optimal:

1: Requires the use of a hotkey combination to change overlays. A single button solution would be preferred.
2. The game is not paused when you display the controls bezel. I was thinking of adding a 'pause_toggle' command before the 'overlay_next' command but haven't found any instances of success. See this thread as an example: https://forums.libretro.com/t/overlay-format-documentation/230

ronbo85 · 29 Mar 2021, 21:57

@mitu Any progress on this? I'm in the process of generating all my channel screens (per @Texacate ). His work is great, but I want joysticks, and spinners, and... ;)

mitu · 30 Mar 2021, 03:47

@ronbo85 Not sure what you mean ?

ronbo85 · 31 Mar 2021, 01:23

@mitu Sorry for being so vague :)
I'm trying to use @Texacate 's work to generate snaps of control panels based on each rom. Unfortunately, his work stops at "buttons". I'd like to extend that to also include joysticks, etc., and I thought if I use the 'controllers.xml' file, that has the data but I'm not so well verse in either Bash or XMLStarlet. I was wondering if anyone else had written any bash scripts to query the controllers.xml file for the controller data. I've got @Texacate 's script generating images for the buttons. Looking to 'complete' the package. (much akin to .. was it CPWizard? .. which I think is outdated at this point. )
Thanks for any pointers! Hope this explains my question better. Let me know if it needs further clarification :)

mitu · 1 Apr 2021, 12:52

@ronbo85 To answer to your question - no. If you have any specific question about scripting though, just post a new topic with it and me or other forum members may be able to help you.

ronbo85 · 1 Apr 2021, 12:52

@mitu said in Show Control Panel Layout before game starts in RetroPie, just like Arcade1UP does.:

@ronbo85 To answer to your question - no. If you have any specific question about scripting though, just post a new topic with it and me or other forum members may be able to help you.

Thank you, will do!

ronbo85 · 14 May 2021, 21:37

@kjarkur said in Show Control Panel Layout before game starts in RetroPie, just like Arcade1UP does.:

@BJRetro the video shows my own regamebox distribution. I can make a fork on github.com. Of course it can be done with retropie easily. General steps are this

create the button mapping pictures in advance

put a picture viewer in runcommand-onstart.sh

I have used here a own picture viewer based on SDL. Reason was that I wanted to use something like quit on all keys and quit after 10 seconds.

@kjarkur , I'm looking for help on the runcommand_onstart.sh . Would like to check out your code that you have running beautifully. I've tried using fbi to display images, but can't seem to get it to show up on screen when running runcommand-onstartup script (screen just goes blank). I am able to run fbi on commandline and get it to display ok. Thanks for any help!

Texacate · 29 May 2021, 23:37

@ronbo85. Apologies. I haven't been on the forum in a long while. If you need any help with the ButtonMap work I did, post again. Agreed. I stopped at buttons, and never directly used controllers.xml...

Regarding FBI:
Take a look at the Python file: simpleServer.py on my github area.
These are the args I'm using to show the image.

sudo fbi -vt 1 -a --noverbose </path/to/image>

Hopefully one of these switches will help your scripting.
Cheers