EmulationStation mod

nj180grados

Hi jacobfk20 ..

First of all congratulate you for your work in Emulation Station, since what you have done is really useful, especially the on-screen keyboard.

I am writing to you in this forum as user of retropie, I am Spanish ..

We currently have a small community via Telegram dedicated to the Raspberry PI and emulators. We have hosted small tutorials and works among them this mod of yours.
We are about 900 users who chat and debate about retropie.
Your work is more than recognized.

We have commented many things among them some deficiencies of ES in retropie that are not explained to this day.

Especially the favorites section and the possibility to bookmark games.

If we have an experimental option for Kids that has the possibility to bookmark .. but it is not useful since to show favorites you have to hide the rest of games.

To put you in situation I put as an example to Recalbox ..
Recalbox has a favorites section in the ES menu where all games are labeled alphabetically whatever the system is. Each part shows the favorites first of the list and from there they already leave the normal list.

Currently we do not have anything like this in Retropie, and as Recalbox also uses ES

I would like to know if it would be very complicated to carry this option of favorites to Retropie ..

Nobody has put it yet and I think it would be really useful to have this possibility .. There are many people who demand this possibility.

I'm not a programmer and we do not have programmers in the community I've talked to you about. But based on the work you've done.

I would like to propose if you would be willing to carry this possibility based on recalbox .. Do you think it would be complicated? I have already seen that other options of recalbox like the music in ES have behaved successfully to retropie.

In short I address you because I see you quite qualified for it and because I still can not explain how something useful is not found in retropie.

I would also like to know if your work in ES will be officially added to retropie in future versions. I vote for it because I think it's great.

Anyway, I would like you to give me an answer. Thanks for your time @herb_fargus

If you still do not know the operation of the favorites in recalbox I leave you an example video:

A greeting from Spain.

EDIT: My apologies to quote at first I was addressing the creator of the mod
@jacobfk20 But by mistake I quoted the @herb_fargus admin. It is already corrected.

lilbud

@nj180grados The lack of a proper favorites menu has been brought up many, many, many times. Someone on the forum has a script that loads BG music.

nj180grados

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

@nj180grados The lack of a proper favorites menu has been brought up many, many, many times. Someone on the forum has a script that loads BG music.

I know, but I'm asking the author of the post since I see that his work is very good.

And I also know that we have KIDS mode but it is not as useful as the example with recalbox.

I do not see anything bad to say more about this.

lilbud

@nj180grados Well... @jacobfk20 has been quiet for a while, i'm just answering your questions

nj180grados

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

@nj180grados Well... @jacobfk20 has been quiet for a while, i'm just answering your questions

My apologies to quote at first I was addressing the creator of the mod @jacobfk20
But by mistake I quoted the @herb_fargus admin. It is already corrected.

Have not answered in the forum for a long time? Could you contact him directly?

herb_fargus

@nj180grados Thing is he's probably busy with real life, job school, etc. If he's interested in stuff he'll be around, if not he'll be dealing with life. We all do this in our free time as we see fit and have interest.

If you really want these improvements feel free to roll up your sleeves, get dirty with C++ and make something cool.

frgn

@herb_fargus it would be great if jacobfk20 shared the tools to compile. I did try to do it yourself according to the instructions on github - process fails
:c

herb_fargus

@frgn you have all the tools available to you already. All you have to do is modify the child friendly module to point to jacobfk20's branch. Install it like you would anything in the setup script and voila!

dudleydes

@frgn You can use a scriptmodule created by forum user PokeEngineer. Download from here. Place it in the /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary folder and then use the RetroPie script to build ES.

ferdnand

Hello, if i could say one thing, Thank you for your mods, and also to the RetroPie team, I have relived my child hood , many times over with the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Retropie, with this mods it makes it even easier to make one for family and friends to make it easier to use or to get up and running....

Keep up the great work..

My name is not important, but you can contact me at ferdnand99@gmail.com

zeblackness

Did this ever get into pulled into the retropie repo? If not, are you planning to?

I'm looking at possibly starting search and would love to start with a gridview already there.

InsecureSpike

@rookervik said in EmulationStation mod:

Oh I forgot to ask for something! * gets down on knees and begs* Can we have a clock? A clock would be so amazing. I dug out an old "grid dreams" mockup I did. Reminded me about wanting a clock in ES. Keep in mind, it was March when I did this mockup.

did this ever become a feature?
i too would find it extremely useful..... please....

lilbud

@insecurespike Sorry to say, but no. Gridview stopped being worked on by @jacobfk20 a while ago. @Koerty picked it up, so go bother him.

dudleydes

@insecurespike I don't believe the clock was ever a feature of the Gridview mod.

A clock in the corner is a feature in the Pegasus frontend but it's still in development so go bother the Pegasus dev.

InsecureSpike

@lilbud said in EmulationStation mod:

@insecurespike Sorry to say, but no. Gridview stopped being worked on by @jacobfk20 a while ago. @Koerty picked it up, so go bother him.

@dudleydes said in EmulationStation mod:

@insecurespike I don't believe the clock was ever a feature of the Gridview mod.

A clock in the corner is a feature in the Pegasus frontend but it's still in development so go bother the Pegasus dev.

yeah i was wondering if the clock idea had ever been added, not necessarily to the grid view but to ES in general

Zigurana

@insecurespike
No, it has never been added, mostly because there is no Real Time Clock on the little computer. That means that the RPi simply does not know the time when it is powered up. You need to have a working network connection in order to retrieve the current time from your network (or the internet).
I spend an evening or two trying to get a separate RTC chip (like this) to work, just so I could make this happen, but I never got it to run, so that little side-project died an early dead.

It could still be done tough, for those machines that do have a working network connection.

InsecureSpike

@zigurana said in EmulationStation mod:

@insecurespike
No, it has never been added, mostly because there is no Real Time Clock on the little computer. That means that the RPi simply does not know the time when it is powered up. You need to have a working network connection in order to retrieve the current time from your network (or the internet).
I spend an evening or two trying to get a separate RTC chip (like this) to work, just so I could make this happen, but I never got it to run, so that little side-project died an early dead.

It could still be done tough, for those machines that do have a working network connection.

ah, i see, i do leave mine connected, maybe if you get time, and decide to add it, could there be a switch in the UI menu to turn it on/off, like the on-screen help, then its there if the user finds it useful?
with changable font, size, color, position etc

thanks for the reply

Zigurana

@insecurespike
If / when I get to this, it will probably be a themable element, so it would be up to the theme to include and format it. That way, we would have maximum flexibility for how a clock would look like.

mattrixk

@zigurana said in EmulationStation mod:

there is no Real Time Clock on the little computer

That explains why my Kodi time was so out of whack when I took my RPi on holidays last week.

Rookervik

Yeah even for me the clock would be wrong pretty often. But after having my Pi running a couple days the time finally updates. And it's glorious on Kodi to see the time. Imagine the greatness of ES.

Also... ES uses time, already, when writing to the gamelist when you last played the game. Sooooo, there are already tons of time errors being written to disk. LOL.