I am a newbie and don't know anything about programming. But I tried to install new Retropie 4.8 on a Armbian Bullseye and I think I could compile almost everything.
I made a Image from the tinker board retropie for anyone who wants to test it or wants to make it better.
I uploaded the image file to my nextcloud. If anyone interested, here is the link:

https://waltikon.mooo.com/index.php/s/3Le33bX2YCZFKFC

I compiled everything, which was to be compiled there. It seems like everything works fine but I can't give any kind of support. If you want to test this image, be my guest. :-)

Hi there,

I am pretty confused about the ORA... I screwed up the 1.5.2 and installed 3.0.6 available on the website while the one posted here is not available as well as the documentation and the usual ssh passwords don't work. Can anyone redirect to the last stable release and documentation, thanks!

@cyperghost yeah, I will try to do that

@pjft

Thank you kindly, sir. The warm welcome means a lot, but there's no need to worry. I'm still somewhat swamped until after the holidays, but I do plan on keeping a tab open here to help out with the most recent round of spammers. Those guys are relentless.

I think this is a good idea, though not one to be taken lightly. Refactorings and cleanups are often double-edged swords, and while I am always supportive of investing time in such endeavors, I fear that we may introduce new bugs and/or remove code that was put there for a reason, even though it might not be at all apparent.

If the scope is more or less well defined upfront (i.e. if we determine that we will look into the screensaver code, or something more), I'm fine with that.

I'm not sure this needs to necessarily be a cross-coordinated effort, though - these efforts are always welcome as long as they're well tested, I believe.

There are a few things on my plate that I'd like to look into, ES-wise, that don't fall into the "new developments" area but rather in the "fixing/improvements" area, namely (in no particular order):

Document OMX and collections features, namely Predictive Profile (High 4:4:4) not working [EASY-ISH] Address textures defaulting to white after returning from an emulator. [MEDIUM?] Improve texture cache to reduce texture pop-in. [MEDIUM?] Fix or mitigate VRAM handling, especially on out-of-memory scenarios. [MEDIUM?] Try to get rid of the two video player options, but rather have a default hardware accelerated player for the Pi that works as intended (i.e. respects the actual layers, rather than being a separate process). [HARD]

I honestly have no idea how to go about several of these, but I secretly hope that with a proper Windows and VS debugging environment I'd be able to make some progress here.

Thanks for starting this.

@backstander btw - rather than downvoting you can flag as spam and moderators will be notified.

@Sano Yes it does use tvservice at the backend. I wanted a c++ implementation rather than running another instance of python.

@ortsac said in How non-techie people can contribute to RetroPie project:

And let us not forget Hardware Issues as well. There are also issues/questions that pop-up involving the hardware side of RPi or the console/controller.

Sure! I think that my info about helping others here in the forums includes hardware issues as well. ;-)

@pjft I refer to the output result ;) Really no idea?
If I want to launch CAPCOM/TESTFILE.test then the output is

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/123456/CAPCOM/TESTFILE.test segacd /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-picodrive/picodrive_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/segacd/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/123456/CAPCOM/TESTFILE.test" Line is ROMname+it's path as in Gamelist... Is Emulatorcall is command call via runcommand.sh

And yes you are totally right... how to find correct emulator call :) But with a bit of investigation it is no problem. But you are totally right that are just cases no user will run in this. But I just want to show what is possible and with the knowledge collected in the last few days it seems absolutly possible to give ES the right push.

So hold on:

Consider if you terminate/shorten 123456/ in the string then you may have the full path of the rom ;) and now compare it to es_systems.cfg? We can parse the system out ;) and then ..... voila a launching abilty via folder navigation :)

In fact I won't use 123456/ give to more a stylish name hidden/, toxxic/or just vvaste/ :D I'm joking but it should work...

@Zigurana If you want, maybe I can take a look when my job on the grid view will be "finished". I start to understand well this part of the code base.

For all those thinking that every option will have help it is not so. The help message will only be shown in Option List / Multiselect Lists atleast at present. Also Help text is optional ie. it is shown only if defined for an option. This allows help to be shown only for complex/ambiguous options like Audio Device selection (both, the one with PCM and the one with Alsa). Many users dont know what these options do and adding a small help text solves this problem.

@pjft Is Random Screensaver in help necessary?

@TMNTturtlguy Your suggestion is also acceptable.

What I was mostly going for was when a user doesnt know what an option does, they might be inclined to checkout all options in < > Type of setting (OptionList). Clicking A on that opens a list of text components. Here we can have some help shown. So help is not obstructing during the normal usage but only shown in deeper menus

@Hex https://github.com/miroof/node-virtual-gamepads was updated a month ago, the other one not, but if it works? :)

I've posted a more detailed list about how non-techie people can contribute with the project here:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11720/how-non-techie-people-can-contribute-to-retropie-project

@meleu said in ES devs and testers, this tool is for you!:

but if EmulationStation development is still hot

Not so much these days.

The script could probably be simplified, since there is branch support in RetroPie-Setup scriptmodules directly and RetroPie-Setup automatically checks for new changes to the branches (letting you know if you should update from source or have the latest source version).

P.S. Happy New Year !

@meleu Power saver is not the same as screensaver. It toggles Polling and Waiting for event. If Waiting is triggered, video with vlc is stopped, audio is not. This happens due to the screen not drawing new frames.

Current behaviour for PS is to be disabled on IGameLstView.etName()=="video" where videos are present. If OMX handles videos differently by displaying that section using a secondary thread for rendering then PS can be always on and videos will work nicely

Demo:

@Zigurana Well I was really thinking about the pi zero not necessarily the pi 3. Don't the USB controllers need to be encoded to whatever the console needs I figured since retropie was already emulating the console controls it might be easier to figure out a way to output that onto however many data pins they have in say a Dreamcast controller as opposed to designing your own custom program through arduino. I mean your going to have to emulate the controller by the console anyway. Does someone already have a project started for Arduino?

@Hex Thanks for the info!

@Arcuza thanks!