Start EmulationStation remotely?

sleve_mcdichael

Pi 4b, RP 4.7.14 (SSH via Terminus app on iPod Touch/iOS 14.6)

I can quit ES remotely over SSH with the command kill $(pidof emulationstation). I can even start it back up with emulationstation, and it comes up on my TV screen, controls work and I can even launch & play a game; however when I close the SSH app on my device, it terminates ES (or RA if I'm in a game) and drops me back into the terminal. Is there a command I can use (from the remote SSH terminal) that will run it locally from the Pi, as if I had run it from a connected keyboard, so that it doesn't terminate when I quit the app (and, ideally, can continue using the SSH terminal instead of it cutting to the black screen I'm getting now while ES runs .)

mitu

You can detach EmulationStation's process using screen (which is a handy utility in itself), by running it in a screen session from your SSH session.
Since I do this for testing sometimes, I'm going to explain the pitfalls of running ES remotely:

runcommand's launching screen will not show on the TV/Monitor screen of your Pi, but on the SSH/screen session from where it is started, hence the launching menu is unusable.
since the controlling terminal is not a console one, keyboard button presses will 'bleed' through to the terminal and may cause inadvertently commands to be run. If you're not using a keyboard, you won't be experiencing this.

What's the use case for starting ES remotely ?

sleve_mcdichael

@mitu said in Start EmulationStation remotely?:

What's the use case for starting ES remotely ?

Example: I've downloaded a new ROM on my iDevice and SMB'ed it to my RPi with a file manager. Now I want to scrape its data with Skyscraper. I have to quit EmulationStation before writing the gamelist.xml with the new data. Let's say I don't have a keyboard, or maybe I'm across the rom from it with a USB extender or wireless gamepad. I could reboot after, or go over to the keyboard and type it in, was just wondering if there was another way.

mitu

Instead of starting ES remotely (once you've exited to use Skyscraper), just stop the console shell where it started.

# find the PID of the auto-login session
$ ps -e | grep bash | grep tty1
13554

# stop the bash login shell and trigger the auto-login again, starting ES
kill 13554

sleve_mcdichael

@mitu this works, thanks! Does anything bad happen if I just use kill $(pidof bash) instead?

(Ah, yes it looks like something bad does happen. As I was messing with this, my ES menu got all jacked up, displaying wrong artwork and not launching a game; and when I quit ES the console text was also messed up all across the screen. A restart seems to have fixed it but I guess I'll stop screwing around and just use the two-step method for as often as I'll never actually need to use this.)

It seems to work, but are there reasons I shouldn't? It seems to always kill the latest instance that's not the one I've run it from (so if I run it from the pi, it kills my SSH session. If I run it from the SSH session, it kills my Pi login and then autologs in to ES.

At this point there are three instances of bash: one from SSH (pts/0) and two from tty1. Repeating the command, kills one of them; repeating it again kills the other and spawns two more. This repeats.)

mitu

@sleve_mcdichael said in Start EmulationStation remotely?:

Does anything bad happen if I just use kill $(pidof bash) instead?

Yes, you may be killing your own remote shell.

sleve_mcdichael

@mitu it never seemed to kill the instance that I ran it from, but it did give ES a stroke, so I won't do it anymore :)