The Ideal RetroPie
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@herb_fargus
I agree with your points. They are in a "high level". Thinking on the "medium level", I would like to have a front end well integrated with RetroArch. -
I say we get all of our ES ideas/forks consolidated into one version of ES: Kids, Grid, Video, Music, and whatever craziness @Zigurana is currently cooking up. Get all of these into one fork. And continue from there.
If we are talking hardware, here is my dream:
- 4 USB 3.0 ports
- At least 32gb flash storage on board.
- 2gb RAM
- 1.5ghz 64-bit Quad Core Processor
On the topic of UI, there is only so much that can be done in the current state.
One day, I'd like to get to something this:
or this: 
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While I'd love the Pi to be more powerful, my wishlist is mainly pointed at the GUI. I'd love to have something that works similar to Kodi or LaunchBox, with lots of different layout views, and different sorting options.
I also really want to be able to sort by genre, so I could view all Racing games, regardless of system. Or only view 2 player games if I have a friend over. Similar to this is idea of custom metadata, or tags. I could have a favourites tag, a 2-player tag, a side-scrolling beat-em-up tag, then I could tick all 3 of those boxes to return the list of games that fit those 3 tags (Streets of Rage, AvP, Double Dragon, Armored Warriors, etc). I could then sort that list by system, or by alphabetical order, or even by age. Maybe have a 2-tier search, so I could sort the games by system, then sort those systems by age (instead of alphabetical).
I'd also like to be able to pull in more than one image per game. Imagine if a game could have a big fan-art background, box art, a slideshow of screenshots and gameplay gif. You can use the Universal XML Scraper to fudge this, but it takes some set up time and it's a lot more work than a lot of people want to do.
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Well, I think we're pretty close to "my" perfect system, It just lack a vídeo support for the background in the system selection window, and harware capable of running It at 1080p.
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@mattrixk said in The Ideal RetroPie:
I'd also like to be able to pull in more than one image per game. Imagine if a game could have a big fan-art background, box art, a slideshow of screenshots and gameplay gif. You can use the Universal XML Scraper to fudge this, but it takes some set up time and it's a lot more work than a lot of people want to do.
Something like this? https://material-design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/tv_v_2/tvexternal/0B56kA3exHMkQQ0gtN2w2cGxZWUE/app_structure_detail_01.jpg
Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade
Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud
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It;'s hard to make suggestions because I don't have the knowledge to do them and don't like telling the devs what to do since they put in so much hard work already. But here it goes:
Config Auto-Backup/reversion - Automatically backup the previous config file and have one of those "Press a Key withing 30 seconds to accept" prompts. That way if you nuke a config, it'll auto-revert back to the last known state. Of course this would be separate from manually editing config files for those who like to go that route.
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RetroPie is not too far off from my ideal emulation setup to begin with. The absolute most important issue for me is how the games perform and control. To that end, I'd want to see an increase of RAM, as well as a more capable GPU for the Pi and a universal control mapping system that is not only versatile, but user-friendly as well.
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@herb_fargus I agree with pretty much all the points you made here. Really the biggest thing for me is a better GPU, whilst still retaining a power requirement no more than 2.5A. But considering the prevalence of relatively powerful GPU's in mobile phones and tablets this shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, however I know the Raspberry Pi foundation wants to stick to open architectures so this no doubt restricts the options significantly. Also I'm essentially just reiterating something I read, but I understand that despite the CPU now being 64-bit capable, the GPU is still a 32-bit architecture. It would be nice to have a 64-bit GPU to go with the new CPU architecture. I wonder if there is a new Broadcom VideoCore V on the horizon or something. As it stands right now, CPU heavy emulators usually work great on the Pi3 CPU, but despite the modest overclocking achievable with the GPU, GPU heavy emulation suffers in HD resolutions (I insist on HD resolution so if something doesn't work well, I omit it rather than opting for lower resolution).
Also an increase in RAM and being able to easily define which controller is first player and which is second player would also be nice. I pretty much like the front end the way it is, but having a web GUI for monitoring and management would be awesome. Right now I just used SSH for monitoring temperatures, CPU, and memory usage. I'm not terribly concerned about internal flash memory myself, unless it will achieve speeds significantly higher than the approximate average 40 MB/s I've achieved with my 128 GB card.
Also metadata like box art and game description for ROM's would greatly enhance the frontend, but other than that the frontend is fine as is in my opinion.
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To be honest I find it amazing as it is. Maybe it's my age but I know if I'd seen this when I was younger it would have blown my mind. I think it was version 4.0.2 when I started to think "hang on, this is now doing what I imagined it would do", and feels now complete.
I'd like to see N64 emulation improved but I think everyone wants that no matter what machine you are running . I'm not convinced throwing more power at that would make much difference; certainly not at the moment anyway. Otherwise this is an amazing feat as it stands and I'm not sure at any point I've thought that it needs to do more. :)
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I would like to see a Raspberry which can run GameCube emulation. Now I still have to use my modded Wii to play them but who knows whats going to be in the future. As for RetroPie, it's kinda fine how it is now. So far all the games I played ran fine! I can play all the games i used to play as a kid on the SNES, N64, PSX, Genesis never owned a Neo Geo console but Neo Geo games are extremely fun to play as well as MAME roms. I started to play them because of my older brother who used to go to arcade halls back in the early 90ties.
But you know what would make RetroPie freaking awesome? If it had a great multiplayer support, like you can add friends, chat with them, talk to them via your mic, invite them to play games with you. And watching your friends play remotely and they can give you control over their controller so you can play remotely. Kinda like the PS4. That would be AWESOME!
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I would like to see a Raspberry which can run GameCube emulation.
Probably by the PI 6, if ever. My mid-2015 computer can barely play GC games.
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Frontend:
Attract-Mode is a very fine addition! Beautiful UI with Marquees, Videos, Categories, Tags, Favorites and much more.It is already available in experimental packages - needs some integrating, but looks far better than EmulationStation - in my opinion.
http://attractmode.org/Just my 3 cents
Thanks for all your work! It is a pleasure to play with retropie.
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@herb_fargus Here goes your hope for more ram http://www.techrepublic.com/article/raspberry-pi-in-2017-new-boards-new-oses-and-more/
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@lilbud No ram, but the Model A 3 could be kinda cool for retropie builds using bluetooth controllers.
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No ram, but the Model A 3 could be kinda cool for retropie builds using bluetooth controllers.
It will also be great for those retro handheld builds! @obsidianspider needs to read that!
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@backstander I need to finish one project first, but I can see a 3-powered handheld in the future.
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Hardware: A pi yet to be released with a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, perhaps some flash memory and of course all the current options of the pi 3. Better GPU.
Enough power to be able to run Naomi/Atomiswave games that would be wicked. I wouldn't mind a small cooling fan if necessary.
The Front End: I was envisioning something like open emu where you have a list of systems on the left and a grid view of sorts of the games on the right, and possible video and music support if I were feeling ambitious.
A better filtering system would be nice. If you have a couple roms its OK but if you start to exceed 100 roms per emulator it would be nice to have the possibilities to sort/filter by genre, A-Z, Z-A, most played evtl. add a favorites feature to add a star next to the roms and only display those. I have seen someone posting a video once with such extended features.
Controls: I was thinking of there being a diagram for each system of that systems controller as you configured your controller so you could know exactly what your buttons corresponded to on the original controller. Also to be able to have settings to control which controller is which player.
I think once you know how the controller setup stuff works its easy but a diagram like you have in windows under advanced settings would be not a bad idea. That would make jstest obsolete.
If I remember right there was a controller sorting feature inside the RetroPie right? Like put port 0 on second position and port 1 on first, something like that.Save States/Load States: When you save it takes a screenshot at your current position in the game and then when you go to load it opens up a menu where you can choose from your savestate slots like the old point and click games or the nes classic
I never used that feature yet. Most games have a build in saving feature. But I have seen that people request that a lot, the screenshot thing. Kinda like the classic NES has?
Web Dashboard: A dashboard that shows all of the pi's settings: temp, space left, up time, etc. Along with a file transfer section that checks hashes of your roms so you know if they work or not before you even try them
That would be VERY helpful.
I guess I am looking forward to a RPi6? or 7? with some of the mentioned improvements? Not sure how much influence RetroPie can have on them though. EmulationStation? Retroarch? Raspberry?
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Considering your hardware requests, you guys should probably take a look at udoo x86. It is pricier than a rpi, but still a good deal.
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Nice! That's really nice! Thx.
Wonder what specs are needed to run Naomi/Atomiswave.
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