Announcing Pegasus Frontend

shantigilbert

@fluffypillow Thank you! this will be of great help! I will let you know how it goes after I try it.

fluffypillow

And I guess this will do as a build guide for now: https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend/wiki/Building.

Twitch0815

@fluffypillow Have compiled, and have it up and running.
So far I can Launch it and exit trying to open the settings menu and or the controls menu via enter or left click on mouse is not responding it does exit and open no problem via enter and or mouse input. Any beginner documentation. Also I would like to add some content to the wiki, possible to allow write privilege to twitch0815 my git account?

fluffypillow

@Twitch0815 yes, Settings and Controls don't do anything right now, as they are not yet done -- it's still in alpha after all. There'll be more documentation as more and more features are complete; I can't write a guide for the settings menu, for example, when there's no settings menu :)

As for the wiki, I've set it up as a separate Git repository, which will auto sync with the actual wiki, see https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend/wiki#want-to-contribute-to-this-wiki.

Allanbuzzy

It'd be awesome to take the Pegasus GUI and turn it into a PS3 XMB style menu. That'd be very awesome.

meleu

@Allanbuzzy Do you know lakka.tv? :-)

Allanbuzzy

@meleu Yes but it doesn't have RetroPie's Ports, video splash screens, etc.

fluffypillow

Actually, creating an XMB theme is not really difficult (compared to the current grid style), it might even work well as a theming tutorial. Here's a quick demo I just made: https://webmshare.com/qN5Yr

You could even replicate the PS3 wave animation:

, though that's a somewhat more complicated topic.

lilbud

@fluffypillow How long did it take you to make that?

fluffypillow

Mm, dunno, I had a dinner break between. Less than a hour I guess.

And an additional 30min trying to decide whether I should set the height of one of the elements to 200 or 210 px...

lilbud

@fluffypillow So is that what can be done with themes?

fluffypillow

However, Qt/QML does have some initial learning curve, so this isn't really a "fair" comparison.

fluffypillow

You can do whatever you want with a theme. Literally. All you need is to call about 3 Pegasus-specific functions to be able to start games. The rest is completely up to you. You can even write a whole game, whatever.

Here's another Qt demo if you're interested:

AlexMurphy

@fluffypillow I hate to be a dissenter but what does this add apart from a lot of flash and eye-candy? Does your new front end add any actual functionality?

PokeEngineer

@fluffypillow

Looks really good! I will look into trying this out after I'm done making a secret (for now...) creation of mine.

meleu

@fluffypillow Does this, let's say, framework have some kind of interface to shell scripts. I mean, provide some GUI widgets like kdialog. IMHO this would be a real game changer.

lilbud

@PokeEngineer Is what you're working on the why you haven't been on in 2 months?

PokeEngineer

@lilbud

Nah. I was just taking a break.

shantigilbert

@fluffypillow Well after a few days of trying to get QT5 to compile in Libreelec I officialy give up :( I wanted to try the frontend on my s905 "mashup" that I use (LibreElec/Lakka/EmulationStation) but I guess I have to wait until someone with more knowledge is able to figure it out, if ever! meanwhile I will use it on my Rpi3 :)

and that demo looks awesome :)

Thanks!

fluffypillow

@AlexMurphy Technically, none of the frontends provide anything you couldn't do with a set of shell scripts and manually edited config files :) The difference is the user experience, I guess. Would you like to see any particular feature? I'm open to ideas. It's just simply that I was not 100% pleased with the currently available frontends, so started working on a new one to make it to my liking.

@meleu Actually, I do was playing with the idea of making a dialog alternative; that'd allow to even theme the whole menu system. Qt doesn't ship with such a program out-of-the-box, but provides all the UI elements to build one.

@shantigilbert Ah I see it's a 64-bit ARM system; it might need some manual compiler flag definition or tweaks. Depending on you device, you'll likely have to create some config files, based on eg. the one for RPi 3 in qtbase/mkspec/devices.

Also Qt 5.9 comes out next week (official releases come twice a year), you might want to try that too.