Attract Mode with RetroPie - Alternative to EmulationStation

senkun

I started again from scratch and been playing with AM for a bit, getting to really like it a lot now that I've got everything working more or less properly on my RPi3.

I've got it to now boot directly into AM, and fixed that xkbcomp RALT error by, well, "compose:ralt" to make it happy. It's pretty seamless now, from booting up into frontend then launching and exiting games. So went tweaking and got rid of that annoying flash of a white xterm window/log using a dirty hack of setting -fg and -bg to black, which also helps hide msgs in between starting and exiting a game. I'm sure there must be a more elegant solution by diverting output windows or suppressing msgs, if anyone?

Some surprises, I left it unattended to answer a call with just the frontend displaying, came back and was a tad shocked thinking somehow a game got launched automatically. Then realized it was just the AM screensaver. It has some awesome options, including full screen videos of whatever game videosnaps you have installed.

True to it's name, Attract Mode is very attractive and dynamic. So very end user friendly (with the setup ease and convenience of Retropie behind it), it just beckons one to try out the games installed. It would be fantastic for a cabinet but I'm looking forward to using it in a small portable setup with one of them cheap GPIO TFT screens.

Finhead

@senkun

For startup I have mine running the standard RetroPie splashscreen with a Video. About 14 secs is all it needs and you don't see anything other than the video after the inital 4 Raspberries and the 4 lines of code for the breif second.

InsecureSpike

@senkun said:

I started again from scratch and been playing with AM for a bit, getting to really like it a lot now that I've got everything working more or less properly on my RPi3.

I've got it to now boot directly into AM, and fixed that xkbcomp RALT error by, well, "compose:ralt" to make it happy. It's pretty seamless now, from booting up into frontend then launching and exiting games. So went tweaking and got rid of that annoying flash of a white xterm window/log using a dirty hack of setting -fg and -bg to black, which also helps hide msgs in between starting and exiting a game. I'm sure there must be a more elegant solution by diverting output windows or suppressing msgs, if anyone?

Some surprises, I left it unattended to answer a call with just the frontend displaying, came back and was a tad shocked thinking somehow a game got launched automatically. Then realized it was just the AM screensaver. It has some awesome options, including full screen videos of whatever game videosnaps you have installed.

True to it's name, Attract Mode is very attractive and dynamic. So very end user friendly (with the setup ease and convenience of Retropie behind it), it just beckons one to try out the games installed. It would be fantastic for a cabinet but I'm looking forward to using it in a small portable setup with one of them cheap GPIO TFT screens.

hi are you able to post up your .img?

senkun

@Finhead said:

@senkun

For startup I have mine running the standard RetroPie splashscreen with a Video. About 14 secs is all it needs and you don't see anything other than the video after the inital 4 Raspberries and the 4 lines of code for the breif second.

For some reason video splashscreens run flaky on mine. If you want you can get rid of the raspberries as well
to /boot/cmdline.txt add logo.nologo

That brief coloured flash on startup you can suppress by adding to /boot/config.txt
disable_splash=1

senkun

@InsecureSpike said:

hi are you able to post up your .img?

hey, I would but it's now been expanded to 16GB and I'd need to borrow a cd drive so I can use gparted and try compress it. As it is, the img we have now is quirky with the keyboard, AM seems to ditch it after a few seconds. If I hadn't set a controller I'd have to ssh in to shutdown or reboot.

I'd wait for @Floob to release his new img tho, it would definitely be the way to go.

InsecureSpike

ok, i just realised i've been trying to run this on a pi B,
stupid me!!!

Finhead

@InsecureSpike said:

ok, i just realised i've been trying to run this on a pi B,
stupid me!!!

Here incase you missed it
Image for RP1+2

InsecureSpike

@Finhead said:

@InsecureSpike said:

ok, i just realised i've been trying to run this on a pi B,
stupid me!!!

Here incase you missed it
Image for RP1+2

yup thought I was using my pi 2 b!

now I am, and have Floobs img working! yay!!

robertybob

So just to confirm, Floob's image doesn't have the RetroPie emulators (i.e Libretro) set up already within AM?

Finhead

@robertybob said:

So just to confirm, Floob's image doesn't have the RetroPie emulators (i.e Libretro) set up already within AM?

Even if it's not, which I believe it might have 1 setup but not 100% since I didn't use his image. IF you go to approx 55:20 on the video he shows you how to setup the mame emulator in retoarch.
IT's very easy to setup emulators.

You guys should really make time and watch his video, he was nice enough to spend the time to do one. Super awesome of him. ;)

robertybob

@Finhead Oh don't worry I did watch it ;) Might have been me being dumb but I couldn't tell if the image did or did not have all of the RP emulators set up.

Floob

@robertybob said:

So just to confirm, Floob's image doesn't have the RetroPie emulators (i.e Libretro) set up already within AM?

It has a couple setup (mame2003 and genesis-plus-gx), but the next image will have the vast majority added (as well as other improvements). I'll set the artwork paths up as well. Obviously all the emulators are already there, but the AM config isnt setup for them yet. As Finhead points out, its not too bad setting them up and there is an example on the vid.

Rion

Sorry to ask this again..

With this setup can you have both emulation station and Attract on the same image.

Attract started from Emulationstation,
Emulationstation started from Attract?

Something like Attract Mode on the homescreen in Emulation station and in Attract Mode?

ashmck73

Yes - you do end up with both EmulationStation and Attract Mode on the same image.

You can run either from the terminal by typing attract to start attract mode or typing emulationstation to start EmulationStation.

I'm sure there would be some way of running one from the other but that sounds like some scripting / programming work which is a tad beyond what I know.

BuZz

The duplicated config is a problem with our image, will correct for next version

senkun

@Rion said:

Sorry to ask this again..

With this setup can you have both emulation station and Attract on the same image.

Attract started from Emulationstation,
Emulationstation started from Attract?

Something like Attract Mode on the homescreen in Emulation station and in Attract Mode?

Yes, Floob built this image with Retropie as base, so it contains both ES and AM.

As it is now, when you boot up you log in to terminal. Then you can choose either to start ES by entering emulationstation from the command line, or start AM by entering xinit attract.

I believe you can have AM started from within ES as an sub-menu item under Ports, if you set it up that way. And with the new changes from Retropie 3.5^ it might be possible to have AM as a custom menu.

I have not played with this yet but I do believe you can start ES from within AM. AM provides an exit option where you can set a command, so perhaps it could be as simple as setting exit command to "emulationstation"

So yes, I think it would be entirely possible to autoboot into either AM or ES, and then launch into the other frontend from within each other.

Have a look here for more info;
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/1071

Finhead

@senkun said:

@Rion said:

Sorry to ask this again..

With this setup can you have both emulation station and Attract on the same image.

Attract started from Emulationstation,
Emulationstation started from Attract?

Something like Attract Mode on the homescreen in Emulation station and in Attract Mode?

Yes, Floob built this image with Retropie as base, so it contains both ES and AM.

As it is now, when you boot up you log in to terminal. Then you can choose either to start ES by entering emulationstation from the command line, or start AM by entering xinit attract.

I believe you can have AM started from within ES as an sub-menu item under Ports, if you set it up that way. And with the new changes from Retropie 3.5^ it might be possible to have AM as a custom menu.

I have not played with this yet but I do believe you can start ES from within AM. AM provides an exit option where you can set a command, so perhaps it could be as simple as setting exit command to "emulationstation"

So yes, I think it would be entirely possible to autoboot into either AM or ES, and then launch into the other frontend from within each other.

Have a look here for more info;
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/1071

IT's not as easy as "emulationstation" , I tried that. It needs to have a script writen I believe to take it to the command prompt and then "emulationstation" I have no idea how to do this so that's where I have stopped my search.
I wanted to exit to ES to run Daphne games since you can set them all up in one emulator, on AM you need to setup individual emulators for each game.

BTW AM should boot direct if you change your profile.d/10-emulationsation.sh to xinit attract

Rion

@Finhead said in Attract Mode with RetroPie - Alternative to EmulationStation:

@senkun said:

@Rion said:

Sorry to ask this again..

With this setup can you have both emulation station and Attract on the same image.

Attract started from Emulationstation,
Emulationstation started from Attract?

Something like Attract Mode on the homescreen in Emulation station and in Attract Mode?

Yes, Floob built this image with Retropie as base, so it contains both ES and AM.

As it is now, when you boot up you log in to terminal. Then you can choose either to start ES by entering emulationstation from the command line, or start AM by entering xinit attract.

I believe you can have AM started from within ES as an sub-menu item under Ports, if you set it up that way. And with the new changes from Retropie 3.5^ it might be possible to have AM as a custom menu.

I have not played with this yet but I do believe you can start ES from within AM. AM provides an exit option where you can set a command, so perhaps it could be as simple as setting exit command to "emulationstation"

So yes, I think it would be entirely possible to autoboot into either AM or ES, and then launch into the other frontend from within each other.

Have a look here for more info;
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/1071

IT's not as easy as "emulationstation" , I tried that. It needs to have a script writen I believe to take it to the command prompt and then "emulationstation" I have no idea how to do this so that's where I have stopped my search.
I wanted to exit to ES to run Daphne games since you can set them all up in one emulator, on AM you need to setup individual emulators for each game.

BTW AM should boot direct if you change your profile.d/10-emulationsation.sh to xinit attract

Hopeful that some bin/bash guru can solve this. I don't mind if it drops to the console with a few lines and then starts attract mode from within Emulationstation and the other way around.

Then you can choose what you want to starts first with profile.d/10-emulationsation.sh or 10-default-frontend.sh

zerojay

https://github.com/zerojay/RetroPie-Extra/tree/master/scriptmodules/supplementary

Shakz

Gui method of switching to and from emulationstation and attract mode:
I came up with a solution for this a few days ago.
I wrote a quick and dirty script to help you setup the same thing on your pi.
This will create a "scripts" section on attract mode. In there it will give you a script to reset the default front end and reboot.
"Launch EmulationStation to Configure Controllers"
This will put you in emulationstation after the reboot.
Under RetroPie I added a script to put you back into attract mode.
" Switch To Attract Mode"

To install just run the following on your pi. It only takes a second. Feel free to look at the code. Its nothing fancy.

cd
wget http://eazyhax.com/downloads/attract/installswitchAM.sh
chmod 755 installswitchAM.sh
./installswitchAM.sh

Hope this helps yall!