Showing text on top of Emulationstation window

[Microwave565]

I've been building an arcade cabinet with Retropie for the last couple months and I am a few steps away from finishing.

What I've been trying to achieve for some time now though is to get text to be shown like for example "Please insert coin" when a game is launched, let's say for example Pac-Man.nes. But the closest I got to it was to getting the text shown when launching the script from terminal. As far as I understand the script successfully detects when Pac-Man.nes is launched and shows the text but it is not visible since the game's window overlays the one where text is shown. As extra info I've been trying to achieve this using the Pygame library.

I'm not sure if the approach is correct and I'm really hoping this is achievable since it's quite a must be for the project. Hopefully anyone has any deeper understanding in this.

[WeirdH]

@Microwave565 If you just want a screen that says or shows something while the game is launched, you have to copy any launching.png that you either made or found to your system (don't know the exact folder from memory, sorry) and then configure runcommand (see Retropie Options submenu) to use art.

[Microwave565]

@WeirdH oh thank you. but is it also possible to then remove that picture when a pin on RPI gets signal?

I have an optical sensor set to detect coins. So when the sensor detects it is it possible to remove that picture from the screen?

[mitu]

No, that's not possible, once the emulator starts, it takes over the display and starts the game.

[sleve_mcdichael]

Both runcommand and EmulationStation have scripting features that can be run before launch -- maybe this could be used to display an image onscreen, then hold for input?

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Runcommand/#runcommand-scripts

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/#scripting

[Microwave565]

@sleve_mcdichael hmm that looks promising. I'll try to do any good with that in the following days. I really appreciate the help!