My Anti-Kid mode

edmaul69

@challenger2010 why dont you just install emulationstation kids?? It lets you safely shutdown plus they cant mess up stuff. Then if you use the konami code you can get it back to full emulationstation mode. The only thing you would want to do is go into retropie menu and go into runcommand and set the runcommand menu to disable joystick which makes it so you have to have a keyboard to change emulator and video settings right before a game. Then after that you can disable retropie menu. But i wouldnt delete it from es_systems.cfg or from the gamelist.xml. If you find the retropie menu in es_systems.cfg if you put a  on the empty line below it, it will disable it. But you can always access all that stuff with a keyboard in the command line. So with emulationstation kids you can still have the ability to use select button to select what alphabet letter to skip to still and the ability to safely shutdown with the start button. If you need to get back to full emulationstation mode you press "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, start on your controller now you can do whatever you need to do with editing stuff in emulationstation. Then there is an option at the top of the start menu to put it back into kids or kiosk mode. Much better than not having any of those options and seriously risking card corruption when you are dangerously just killing the power without a proper shutdown and not being able to skip to a certain letter sucks when you have a long gamelist. And if you didnt want them to shutdown or use the letter select option you set it into kiosk mode. But kids is the safer way to be able to shutdown.

challenger2010

Thanks for the reply. I tried that package but my kids still brought up the pop-up menu screens and drove me crazy to help them get out of it. As for long game lists, you can just use the upper buttons to jump a screen at a time. My biggest list is around 700 games so this works fine. I have been using PI for 2 years and have not messed up an SD card yet over three different systems. I do keep an image of the card ready to go just in case. I personally just needed a complete lockout for my kids.

Eater_Of_Cheese

@edmaul69 really? The Konami code gets out of it?
Well, that was an unnecessary reimage.

edmaul69

@Eater_Of_Cheese yup. Sucks you had to do a reimage.

edmaul69

@challenger2010 You have to select kid mode in the menu to activate it. Then the only popups they get is shutdown and letter select.

Eater_Of_Cheese

@edmaul69 I reimage way too much anyway. Sometimes it's pulling the plug accidentally, sometimes I just am messing around and I corrupt it, and so on, and so on.

challenger2010

@edmaul69 Yeah, got all that. I just don't want any menu options for them. Just the ability to pick a game, that's it. Every time someone new uses it, they pick a game then hit start. Then they bother me how to get out of the menu and how to pick a game. All that is gone now😀

edmaul69

@challenger2010 thats why they have kiosk mode on it. No menus. But you still can get back to it if you need to.

challenger2010

@edmaul69 Kiosk mode still uses start and select to bring up pop-up menus. My way eliminates all of it.

Zigurana

Interesting solution.
I made de kid-kiosk UI EmulationStation a while back, this is the first time I got this particular feedback,

I find it funny though, while my kids were able to completely destroy the regular ES within 5min ('daddy, the up/down no longer works!'), they never had an issue with pressing a button twice, thereby simply closing the menu. The youngest is four yo btw.

Does anyone else think it's worthwhile to introduce another UI-mode, say 'minimal', in order to get rid of even more UI elements?

pjft

I could see that as an option, though I struggle to see how to properly shut down the system?

Rion

@pjft By switching to a bare minimal you could just use the Konami code to get back and from there shut it down.

I know @Zigurana has been working on this alot and even if it's not possible right now i would love to see this implemented in to the main branch at some point.

This and @fieldofcows work on video support is my favorite features so far.

pjft

@Rion Oh, don't get me wrong - I am a big fan of the ES Kids version that Zigurana develops! In fact, I had it on my setup until the Video one came up. I'd certainly like to see it in the main branch :)

My question was about how to then shutdown the system without menus, but I forgot about the Konami code.

Thanks!

challenger2010

Well, you know that I think it would be great! And needed😀