Random game select option

Elohim

Hi all,
I have a feature that I think would be nice to have in Retropie when choosing games. I believe there are many retrogamers out there who play their favourite games, but have a lot more games than they have played, or ever can, play.

I would like to have a "random console" or "random game" option that you can choose in the same way as choosing "Megadrive" or "Amiga" or "C64". Inside the console you choose some options like "included consoles" and/or "included game directories". Perhaps even an option of "start random game at startup" to get it even more interesting, and then you never know what game is going to be started when you boot up.

My idea is simple – to randomly get a game to play from your own choice of consoles or games. Perhaps it's possible to do different constellations of the randomness, to save different scenarios of how games are randomly chosen.

/Elo

iconrumble

I'm suprised no one picked this up... I think this is a must-have...
I suppose we could create a ney ES system named "RANDOM" and inside an .sh executable with a random file selector script for each system...
I easily found a number of random file selector scripts online:
ls -1 | shuf -n 1
or
a=(*); echo ${a[$((RANDOM % ${#a[@]}))]}
or
for i in *; do echo "$i"; done | shuf -n1

I don't know much about linux... Maybe someone could try and check it out...

Elohim

I say it's a must have feature!

Brigane

This would be a very nice feature, then I can finally force myself to play other games than the usual ones :D

shu1720

Great idea, please include in version 3.8!

brunoaco

cool!!

great idea!

Zigurana

It's still beta / experimental, but you could try this : https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation#random-game-selection, and see how you like it.

Elohim

@Zigurana Sounds nice – how do I implement it? I see the download of the zip-file, then what?

best,
Elo

Zigurana

please have a thorough read of the complete wiki page, particularly https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation#installation.
Again, make backups, expect bugs.