Don't try this at home, kids

lilbud

@Rookervik I have 3 emulators set in the mario.cfg. Nestopia, SNES9X-2010, Gambette. But the whole system will default to nestopia, regardless of what ROM was actually chosen.

dudleydes

I set up a system for rom hacks and homebrews that currently uses 8 emulators - Atari 2600, NES, Megadrive, SNES, MS-DOS, Intellivision and ZX Spectrum. (I haven't decided whether to use lr-fuse or ZEsarUX for Castlevania Spectral Interlude).

I didn't think it was too difficult a task. I copied and pasted the emulator commands into the hacks system's emulators.cfg. I didn't worry what the default was as I would be specifying the emulator for each game in the runcommand menu. Though it can be annoying when I miss chance to do this or if I have forgotten an extension in es_systems.cfg so a game doesn't show up in ES in the first place.

I'm not good at creating themes so I decided to keep mine simple. The logo gave me a chance to practise Inkscape. And I see I have left the WASD icon from the Ports system.

lilbud

@dudleydes That is what I have to do to. This would work well for smaller franchises, say, Zelda. But would be improbable for Final Fantasy.

herb_fargus

@lilbud what we really need is a sqlite filter with tags rather than having to edit the emulators config but that's more of a new frontend thing or a large update to ES. one can hope anyways

lilbud

@herb_fargus Is there a way for the software to load an emulator for a ROM regardless of system?

Concat

I set something up that is similar for MSDOS and Ports (combining them under one "system"). Since I also hated having multiple folders, I moved everything to a new folder and just created scripts which launch them all properly.

Definitely time consuming... but I wouldn't say it's a technical challenge or anything like that. I didn't change the theming or anything, but I do want a different vector.

Come to think of it, is there a way of seeing all the different vector options for PC? Other than manually finding the files of course...

caver01

Is this similar to the way the Arcade system is built so that it works with RunCommand? I was thinking Daphne could/should be integrated with Arcade. Would that be possible?

Concat

I don't see why it wouldn't be possible...

Hell I even defined a second DosBox "emulator" that you can select from runcommand which launches an additional key-to-joystick mapping program along side dosbox so that the analog stick controls the mouse. I called it Dosbox-Loadmap so I can select it from runcommand for the roms I want it for. I did this specifically for 1st person shooters because I wanted to use a controller, but I also wanted mouselook.

These options are all available. Just trace through the logic Retropie uses, from displaying the roms in the system to launching the game and edit each applicable config accordingly. I don't trust my memory enough to indicate every step you'd need to take, but I figured it out on my own and I am definitely not a programmer...

herb_fargus

@lilbud I don't know, I'm not super familiar with the code tbh. There is always a way of course ;) I know there are codes in the current modules that define a default emulator for each system but that's pretty much all I know. The rest at this point seems to be a manual process

TappedOut

I was thinking that you could populate a new 'system' that has the .sh extension. Then, parse each emulators gamelist looking for games that meet your criteria (string in one of the tags, etc), fetch the command that is run for the game's emulator from es_systems.cfg <command> tags to create the shell scripts.

Each shell script would call run-command and pass in the correct arguments: VIDEO_MODE _SYS_/_PORT_ SYSTEM ROM

MWGemini

@herb_fargus said in Don't try this at home, kids:

what we really need is a sqlite filter with tags rather than having to edit the emulators config but that's more of a new frontend thing or a large update to ES. one can hope anyways

This is what @fieldofcows suggested in this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6985/metadata-improvements-in-emulationstation

While he's been busy with the WSOD fix, I put together a fairly comprehensive design doc that will allow a lot more power to users and theme designers. I'm hoping he and/or I can get it implemented sometime over the next few months. Fingers crossed...