Assistance required; moonlight shortcut in Retropie

[piebert]

Hello all

I am very new to coding to and to the Pi community. I recently bought myself a Raspberry Pi 4 so that I can dabble with Retropie. I am enjoying what I have found so far and the possibilities excite me!

My goal:

Setting up the Retropie in my living room, so that I can stream games from my PC which is in another room (both connected to my network via cable). I do not have a keyboard or mouse connected to my Pi, so I would like to have a UI by which I can launch games and also tweak their settings (resolution, bitrate etc.) on the Pi via my xbox 360 controller without having to connect via SSH or connect a keyboard. I would like to have both steam link and moonlight installed to have both options in case one happens to perform better for particular applications.

I will also be messing around with some emulation (mostly PSX), but this comes second to my main goal.

My request

A) I have been messing around with Steam-link seeing as Moonlight is not cooperating with me (see point B). I installed Steam-link from the experimental packages and I see that it adds an entry to the Retropie list called "Ports" under which Steam-link is listed. I was wondering if there is a way to add a shortcut to launch the Moonlight-qt UI as an item in the "Ports" list? This seems like a clean way to achieve my goal and have these two grouped under the same heading in the Retropie UI.

B) Optional reading and plan B if A is not possible

I performed a fresh install of Retropie over the weekend. I used Raspberry Pi Imager and installed the Retropie build for the Pi 4.

After this completed, I went in to install Moonlight from the Retropie menu, under the experimental packages. There are two options there; install from source or install from pre-compiled binary. I believe these are both embedded versions. I opted for the "install from source" option as I didn't really know what either of them was and couldn't really find an explanation about them anywhere(noob here).

I paired to my PC and all that went OK. I did a reboot and hoped to see a new menu item in Retropie but it was still only the Retropie settings menu that showed up.

At this point, I installed the pre-compiled binary version and did a reboot too. Nothing doing there either. At this point I thought I'd try and install the moonlight-qt version which I found on Moonlight's website for the Pi - https://github.com/moonlight-stream/moonlight-docs/wiki/Installing-Moonlight-Qt-on-Raspberry-Pi-4

I don't really remember what I did at this point, probably just a reboot, but shortly after this I saw a new page appear in Retropie! It was called Steam, and all my stream-able games from my gaming PC showed up!

At this point, I was thinking that the files I had installed from the experimental folders clearly did nothing so I thought I'd uninstall them as it was probably Moonlight-qt that was doing the magic. After doing that, the games would no longer launch from the list even after reinstalling the experimental packages again. So seeing as I had gotten it right once before, I figured I would reinstall from scratch and try follow the same steps I had just performed. Needless to say I spent the next 5 hours fumbling around trying to install those three things in different orders and run updates at different times and not once was I able to get that "Steam" entry to show up again.

So I would be beyond grateful if somebody perhaps knows what I need to do exactly to get this to show up again. I did not have to add any additional code as far as I recall and it is driving me crazy figuring out why it is not showing up like it did that first time.

Thanks so much for your time if you have gotten this far. Any advice would be well-received.

Pi Model or other hardware: Pi 4 4gb
Power Supply used: Official
RetroPie Version Used: RetroPie 4.7.1
Built From: Raspberry Pi Imager
USB Devices connected: Xbox 360 controller receiver
Controller used: Xbox 360 controller

Piebert

[mitu]

The Moonlight port doesn't have a shortcut (like SteamLink), instead it adds the Steam platform with the games from your Steam installation and allows you to start each game from that system.

To re-generate the list of games in the Steam folder, you need to configure Moonlight - after installation - from the RetroPie-Setup -> Configuration/Tool. There should be a moonlight entry with several menu options (set host, configure apps, bitrate, etc.).

[piebert]

@mitu thanks for your reply. Are you referring to the embedded versions of Moonlight? If so, would the pre-compiled binary or the source version be preferable?

[mitu]

@piebert said in Assistance required; moonlight shortcut in Retropie:

Are you referring to the embedded versions of Moonlight?

Yes, this is what RetroPie includes - https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/scriptmodules/supplementary/moonlight.sh.

If so, would the pre-compiled binary or the source version be preferable?

There's no preference, use the binary if it's available since it's faster to install.

[piebert]

@mitu I will give it another shot over the next few days. As I said previously, for some reason I just could not get it to display after the one time that it did.

[piebert]

@mitu I had a look at the configuration/tool menu and found an option over there to generate the steam list of games. Thank you so much!