"Favorites" menu

enderandrew

@ebtalk I have the Child-Friendly version running on my system.

Basically it adds a "Favourite" option to the metadata. You can set games as favourites, then you can decide to only display the favourites. If you are using the special Carbon theme listed on the Wiki page, you can even set up X or Y as a hotkey to add a game as a favourite, or just edit the game's metadata using the menu.

It also has 2 other new metadata options: Child-Friendly and Hidden.

Tagging favorites should really be a separate feature from a child-friendly mode. Ideally a child-friendly mode should have a list of child-appropriate games, hide the rest and hide the settings menu so they can't change anything or screw anything up. I wonder if the community could help provide a list of child-friendly games for each system that you get with the rest of your scraping.

mattrixk

@enderandrew: The main feature of the Child Friendly ES is the ability to change UI Modes between Full, Kiosk and Kids.

Full is the total RetroPie setup.
Kiosk hides things like the RetroPie Settings option and some of the other Menu options. It also hides all ROMs with the "Hidden" metadata tag set.
Kids hides just about all settings and menu options, and only shows ROMs that have the "Child Friendly" metadata tag set.

I think the favourites is just a happy extra that Zigurana decided to add in.

I like your idea of a list of kid friendly games.

ebtalk

@mattrixk is there a way to just use the favorites feature and not use the children's menu?

mattrixk

@ebtalk: It's all part of the same package, but you can simply not use either the Kiosk or Kids UI Modes.

I just use the favourites feature, and when I don't feel like scrolling through everything, I just turn on the "show favourites only" option, and it hides everything else.

I also mark some games as Kid friendly, just so I can tell at a glance as I'm scrolling through, but it's not a major feature for me (yet. My son isn't quite old enough, but I can see it being handy in a few years).

Some themes will show an icon if a ROM has any of the "fav", "kid" or "hidden" metadata tags set. There is a link to an altered Carbon theme on the mod wiki page, and my MetaPixel theme also uses them. I was certain I had fixed up Io and Spare to use them too, but according to Git I haven't.

ebtalk

@mattrixk I gave it a test install. On the surface it looked nice. The features are really helpful. When I changed one game like Little League Baseball (NES) as a favorite. It appeared in favorites. As a test, I removed it from favorites and it kicked me out of EmulationStation and to the command line screen and my keyboard suddenly wouldn't work.

I had to restart my Pi. Tried it again and it all locked up again.

ebtalk

I uninstalled the experimental package and now I get an emulationstation command not found when I start my Pi. Uh oh.

ANy thoughts?

Zigurana

@ebtalk this is a known bug.
It's because you had one game set as a favorite, turned on the favorite-only view, and then removed the one and only favorite.
You can fix this for now by remotely editing: ./.emulationstation/es_settings.xml and setting favorites_only = false.

mattrixk

I'm very glad you showed up to answer this @Zigurana, as I would not have been able to.

ebtalk

@Zigurana @mattrixk any idea if uninstalling it would have removed emulationstation?

Zigurana

@ebtalk how did you uninstall?
What happens when you run emulationstation from it's original location?

ebtalk

@Zigurana I went to the manage experimental tools page and chose to uninstall it. I now get a emulation station cannot be found. Please go to emulationstation.org

ebtalk

Here's what it says now:
"We can't find any systems!
Check that your paths are correct in the systems configuration file, and your game directory has at least one game with the correct extension.

Visit emultationstation.org for more information."

====================

To confirm, I do have games set up in the directories.

BuZz

@ebtalk update all packages.

Kit8

I love so much retropie that just registered on the forum to ask for this feature xD

ebtalk

@Zigurana

What if this happens when I have multiple games set as favorite.

I made sure I had at least three games set to favorites per emulator. I changed my view to Favorites On. Everything worked.

I then changed my view to show all games. It sent me back to the command line and crashed.

Zigurana

@ebtalk.
Crap. That's something else again then, no idea yet.
Could you please file an issue for this on my github branch?

ebtalk

@Zigurana Done

ebtalk

@Zigurana Is there a way to disable this package? Last time I uninstalled it, it removed everything. So I would just like to disable it momentarily until a couple of the bugs can get tweaked.

daeks

I would like to support this feature request. I already tried the kids mode version from @Zigurana, but compared with the version from recalbox I am missing the following feature:

Display favorite star at the name
Sort the favorites at the top of the list

tfpHumorBlog

Let me make the case for MAME favorites in very practical sense. (I'm sure this is unnecessary since everyone in the thread seems to think it's a good feature to add). But maybe this would help prioritize it up the dev roadmap.

So, I have maybe 10 different home consoles in ES. And because, for example, I don't want 99% of the NES library in there, and only my favorites, it's easy enough to just upload my 20 favorite roms. In that respect, favorites is probably unnecessary for players like me with respect to home consoles.

But I suspect for many of us, when we install MAME roms, we upload the entire set. This just tends to be easier than trying to find each rom individually and making sure it's compatible. (example - If you've ever tried to install NinjaBaseballBatman, which usually isn't in sets, you'll probably find a few NinjaBaseballBatman roms that do not work with your chosen MAME emulator before you find one that does work) So, my guess is that almost all of us upload the entire romset when it comes to MAME. That's likely thousands of MAME roms.

Another practical reason is that it takes a long time to cycle through the rom list (Just try to go from A - Z and it's probably a 20-30 second process on the GUI). And, well, it's because there's 1000s of roms in there. Duh.

If it was simpler to add MAME roms, then I'd say favorites aren't that important since you could just easily upload the ones you want (like for the home consoles). But it's 1000000x easier to just upload the entire romset for MAME.

Anyway, I'm in no way complaining about having to wait a few seconds to scroll up and down a MAME list in ES. I just write out my favorites and keep a list next to the machine. But even if there was a little icon next to the each favorite rom, that would allow me to visually see them when scrolling.

Thanks for listening!