Parental Controls to restrict emulation station and retroarch settings

gizmo90

I'm putting together a small pi zero nes for my nephews and I'd like to stop them from messing with the settings. Is there an official way to do this now?

I've seen a video covering a package called emulation station for kids but that was from 2016. Plus it didn't seem to cover retroarch either. A simple password system to turn off setting editing would suffice.

Any advice much appreciated.

Luddo183

@gizmo90
This should help on the Emulation Station side. I'm not sure about RetroArch.

gizmo90

@luddo183 Great, thank you. :)

IanDaemon

@gizmo90 As @Luddo183 said EmulationStation is fairly easy and straightforward. Just set things as "kid friendly" and use "Kid mode" for the UI. Retroarch would be a little more difficult as it'd be a combination of things. You could turn off the runcommand launch menu, disable joysticks during ROM loading. I think it's possible, it's just more than one step.

In EmulationStation you have control over each entry (ROM/script) and an easy way to go back-and-forth. (I'm not sure if a keyboard wouldn't always allow the "mame menu" and Retroarch functionality.)

mitu

For RetroArch, just disable the menu hotkey so the menu cannot be opened. This was save/load would still work, but the configuration settings would not be accessible.
Just find the .cfg file for the gamepad under /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads , open it in a text editor and comment out (add a # as the first character on the line) or delete the line that contains

input_menu_toggle_btn

gizmo90

@mitu I tried your suggestion but it didn't seem to do anything? Perhaps it's my understanding of retroarch? When I say retroarch I think I'm talking about the emulator itself which runs the games. Whereas emulation station is the frontend? So for me, retroarch includes the box that pops up when a game is selected that says
Press a button to configure
Errors are logged to /dev/shm/runcommand.log
And also the ability to go into that configure menu while playing a game. Have I got that right?

Basically I'd like to be able to shut that box off at the beginning and also the ability to get to the configure screen from games. Is this possible? I just want to be able to turn on the pi and let players select games and play them. I don't want them to be able to alter or change anything.

mitu

@gizmo90 said in Parental Controls to restrict emulation station and retroarch settings:

When I say retroarch I think I'm talking about the emulator itself which runs the games. Whereas emulation station is the frontend? So for me, retroarch includes the box that pops up when a game is selected that says
Press a button to configure
Errors are logged to /dev/shm/runcommand.log

The front-end part is right, when you're referring as the menu that pops-up when starting is the runcommand launch menu, which can be disabled as a previous post mentioned.

But once the game is launched, then RetroArch (the emulator) takes over and it has it's own menu - opened up by the Hotkey + X button combination. I was referring to this menu when mentioning to disable it by editing the controller configuration file.

gizmo90

@mitu Thanks once again mitu. It's all setup and working great now. :) Just took a while to get my head around it all! Need to write all this down as I'll likely forget it.

mitu

If you've modified the config file, you might as well disable the Reset hotkey also, mashing buttons can often lead to the game being reset.

gizmo90

@mitu Good point. I've hashed out the reset line now too. :)