Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@lilbud this happens when no games have been found, that is, there was a problem with loading some of ES2's XML files. Try checking the log file (~/.config/pegasus-frontend/lastrun.log) for any errors.

lilbud

@fluffypillow ~~That file doesn't exist, I even had to create the theme folder~~

Never mind, I got everything to work

Darksavior

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@Darksavior you've also mentioned dpad/analog problems, what kind of controller is that exactly? Does it happen only with that controller?

My dpad is recognized as Left analog left/right and Right analog up/down. I don't think the pegasus controller configurator works correctly because I can't change it to dpad. The buttons work. I'm using original snes controllers connected directly to gpio using the gamecon driver/schematic. It only happens on the snes pad. My usb controller and 360 arcade stick work fine.

These are the controls ES configured on my snes pad:
input_up_axis = "-1"
input_down_axis = "+1"

My usb 360 stick and usb controller:
input_up_btn = "h0up"
input_down_btn = "h0down"
input_right_btn = "h0right"
input_left_btn = "h0left"

And thank you for the new update. -image pictures work again. -marquee -logo -screenshot are not. I've tried to use sselph's scraper on pc again to get both boxart and marquees and the same time, but marquees just won't show up. Probably has to do with the gamelist.xml not having a marquee section. Update: I couldn't find an automated way to get marquee's into the gamelist so I'll have to use boxart only.

Another request: For the games that don't have video (none of mine do at the moment because it crashes pegasus), to replace that small section with a screenshot of the game if possible. If it's not easy then it's no big deal.

Also, if you can look into why usb keyboards don't work in Retropie-Setup/runcommand/alsamixer, etc if ran FROM pegasus. If they are ran from ES, the usb keyboard works. As I said in a previous post, the alsamixer requires the keyboard, and it's impossible to use it if it's loaded from pegasus. The keyboard works fine IN pegasus.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior I can confirm that keyboard support is indeed broken. It does work in game though, hm... I'll see if I can debug it.

original snes controllers connected directly to gpio using the gamecon driver/schematic

Ah, I guess that's not something I can just pick up one for testing, then :) Pegasus primarily uses the evdev input event interface for gamepad input, so if a button is reported as axis, I'd suggest taking a look around the driver and evdev. You can see some information and test the controller with evtest. Qt makes a difference between buttons and axes, which is why you can't mix them.

Alternatively there's a secondary, SDL2-based input handling you can use by export QT_GAMEPAD=sdl2 before starting Pegasus, but I think we tried that and it didn't work. Its compatibility can be improved though, so I plan to add a patch which may fix the problem.

-marquee -logo -screenshot are not

You mean assets in romdir/media/with those suffixes don't load for you? They should work fine, unless there were some problems loading the pictures (eg. when a file has PNG extension, but actually it is a JPG file). Such errors should be logged in the log file.
Or you mean ES2 asset tags eg. <logo>? Only <image>, <marquee> and <video> is supported at the moment (though it seems I should support only <image>). I've generated them using UXS.

Another request

Sure, it can be done.

fluffypillow

I've just did a new speed test, apparently now I load 1505 games in 1590±35 ms (except the first start).

And I've also noticed that now the RetroPie menu icons appear as well, since they too use the <image> tags :)

Darksavior

@fluffypillow
I did manage to change the controls for up,down,left,right to the Left Analog. Well, the whole reason I'm trying to assign my dpad to pegasus's dpad was so I can control pegasus. No way to make analog controls control pegasus as well?

I was trying to see if selph's scraper threw in marquee's inside the gamelist.xmlbut I couldn't figure it out. Thanks, throwing the -logofiles in /media work just fine and I'll do that instead. I'm spending more time sorting pictures than playing games:)

HurricaneFan

@darksavior I believe it can add marquee images, if you run this at command prompt, you should see a couple marquee options.

/opt/retropie/supplementary/scraper/scraper -help

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Pegasus is also loading much slower when I added all the marquees to /media. Tried the latest version now and it still does it. Pegasus says Data files loaded in 99783ms for 2234 games found. Removing the media folders lower it to 6968ms. I'm nowhere near finished deleting games, though.

@HurricaneFan Thanks, I tried that, but after many heachaches I'm fine with throwing files in a folder and calling it a day without messing with scrapers.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior

99783ms

Yikes! That's a bit too high for a Pi 2/3... Then again, I've measured it only on my Pi 3 config yet, so it's not a 100% accurate number.

No way to make analog controls control pegasus as well?

I think I can add support for that.

I'm spending more time sorting pictures than playing games:)

Just throw everything to media that isn't supported by ES :) I also plan to add subdirectory support eventually to organize it.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow By just adding my snes logo png's to /media and it doubles the load time. I have games/pictures on a 128GB usb stick but I don't think that should affect loading times much. I'm using a pi3 overclocked to 1.3Ghz.

Now that there seems to be some sort of theme support, is there a way to use my own pictures for the system logos or add them in the future? These in particular from this error:
0_1501663706403_system svg.jpg

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

I think I can add support for that.

Thanks

fluffypillow

@Darksavior asset loading speed depends mostly on the (individual) file access speed, which seems to be better on microSD cards. CPU speed isn't really the bottleneck here.

system logos

Not yet, but I do want to add support for them.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I'm trying different file systems but I can't seem to get a decent speed from usb. Can you re-add the option to load pictures from ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images on microsd ?

EvilDindon

Wow looking forward for this awesome frontend !

fluffypillow

@Darksavior hm okay, though it might slow down the loading a bit. I should start implementing some kind of plugin system, so you could enable/disable/fine tune ES compatibility.

fluffypillow

Had some technical difficulties this week, so there are mostly just small changes:

assets are searched in ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images again
fixed a bug on Windows, where sometimes assets weren't found
minor bugfixes
started writing some automated tests to make sure things won't accidentally break

Also as there have been over 100 commits since alpha 2, I've marked today's release as alpha 3.

fluffypillow

PS. I've also removed the SDL2 dependency
PPS: @Darksavior it seems analog controls isn't as trivial as I've expected, might take some more time

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Yay. I appreciate it. Analog controls are detected and responding in the controller settings so pegasus sees something..

Also, loading times went down again when I moved pics back to the microsd. :D

fluffypillow

I've played around with the GStreamer packages:

if gstreamer1.0-omx is installed (which enables hardware acceleration), h264 videos play fine, but others get corrupted picture
updating GStreamer to the latest stable (1.10) doesn't fix the issue
gstreamer1.0-libav (which is the FFMPEG wrapper/plugin) with gstreamer1.0-plugins-good plays all tested video files (h264 from screenscraper, handbrake-ified mp4 files from es-toolkit)
gstreamer1.0-libav or gstreamer1.0-plugins-good alone doesn't produce good result (black picture/decoder errors), but together they work nicely, I didn't need other plugin packs

So it seems something's broken in the Qt Multimedia module's hardware acceleration support; I'll probably have to write a custom plugin or see if I can patch it. Until then, you can get the best results with the gstreamer1.0-alsa gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-plugins-good packages.

fluffypillow

On the previous week I was mostly testing things, like the GStreamer packages, and writing an automatic test suite.

This week, however:

added support for the <favorite> ES2 tag
- has no visible effect yet, I'll probably add a heart or something
added filter panel
- you can filter by name (or name parts), to favorites or to multiplayer games
- others might come later (eg. custom tags)
- video

The filter panel is work in progress, will be available in a few days.

retrolang

@fluffypillow I hadn't thought about filtering based on number of players. I ran into that the other day when trying to figure out which games were 2 player with a friend. Thanks for your work, I've been using the alpha builds and they keep getting better.