I have just had a great idear or maybe it might be way too much outta the box loll please anyone let me know if this can be done

I have just saw a post about someone who want to start emulationstation on his PI from ssh on his cell phone ( https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5941/start-emulationstation-with-ssh/3 ) and that gave me this idear:

On my laptop i am runing ubuntu ( i do not want or need ubuntu help here, that is not the question ). So what if i install retropie/emulationstation on my laptop then with my raspberry pi a could SSH into my laptop and start emulationstation then import the display back into my raspberry pi 3 or export it from my laptop to the raspberry pi 3.

The reason of this is that since i have my PI3 since 2 or 3 months ago at most i think, it is what i am using as a multimedia for retropie and kodi and browsing the internet with raspbian with pixel. My PI3 is connected on my tv with HDMI ( that use to be my laptop setup ) but it is why i bought a PI3, to remove my laptop from tv connection and only use the Pi3 on the tv itself.

So, since my laptop is way more powerfull then my PI3 ( witch i honeslty really enjoy everything about that credit card size box ) i was wondering if it could be better to run retropie from it but start it from my Pi3 through ssh and have it played on my tv without the need to connect back my laptop on my tv with HDMI. I know that setup would be a lot more easy as i would only need to install retropie on my laptop then connect it on the tv but....... that is not what i want.

You guys are PRO's and i am pretty sure you can help me achieve this setup and it could be working. With that setup, i would not have any PSP and N64 lagging problem loll. My laptop has 4GB of RAM.

Am i getting crazy with this or creative loll ???

@edmaul69

I like that even better.

I've had my PI 3 running for 93 days without ever shutting down. Emulation Station goes into a dimmed mode after a few minutes. What that does for power consumption, I don't know.

4 hours since last play system temperature is 42c. We have 21c in house. I don't have a heat sink, but I haven't attached the top lid either.

The nice thing about having it running 24x7 is that is gets out of dimmed mode nicely by pushing the X-button on the Xbox 360 controller and you're good to go...

@joemommasfat Thanks for your reply! I'll watch that thread with interest! I consider the addition of the metadata tag "sortname" as vital for any well-organized collection of games. It's such a simple and useful tool to maintain actual game titles as well as release order.

BTW, for the past few months I've been using my own method for achieving what I wanted. It's not as insane as my earlier post, but it does require a certain level of obsession.

I realized that the vast majority of games organized quite well, and only a few were "out of order", like my Mortal Kombat example above. So I only needed to affect those games, while leaving the rest intact. This led me to abandon the "22... 23... 24..." idea. But I was still thinking about using fonts to solve the issue.

Then I remembered that Unicode has characters that do not display (or just look like spaces). Since these would show up at the end of an alphabetical sort order, I can use them to re-order select objects.

So I looked it up, and saw that I can use the following codes for these characters:
t​ t‌ t‍ t‎ t‏ t‐

And this is how I used them...

<game> <path>./Mortal Kombat.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8203;</name> </game> <game> <path>./Mortal Kombat II.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8204;II</name> </game> <game> <path>./Mortal Kombat 3.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8205;3</name> </game> <game> <path>./Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.bin</path> <name>Mortal Kombat&#8206;3: Ultimate</name> </game>

Since the "space characters" show up before the game numeral, and the "space characters" increase, they show up in alphabetical order. All I needed to do now was modify the font I was using to make the "space characters" use the same data/display as a regular space. I did this by opening the font I was using (in this case it was DIN) in a font editor, copying the "glyph" for a regular space, and pasting it into the correct spot for the "space characters" I was using.

It has actually worked out quite well for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with every instance of odd series naming. For example, MK3 Ultimate doesn't work perfectly (It should be called "Ultimate MK3"). Also "Rocket Knight Adventures" and "Sparkster" aren't in the correct order (annoyingly separated by Sonic's games). But this is a large step forward for me, and something I can work with for now.

Here's some other examples that I've done this with...

Name in gamelist.xml Name (and order) as displayed in ES Sonic&#8203;the Hedgehog Sonic The Hedgehog Sonic&#8204;the Hedgehog 2 Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Sonic&#8205;the Hedgehog 3 Sonic The Hedgehog 3 Sonic&#8206;&amp; Knuckles Sonic & Knuckles Sonic&#8206;&amp; Knuckles + Sonic 2 Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 2 Sonic&#8206;&amp; Knuckles + Sonic 3 Sonic & Knuckles + Sonic 3 Pokémon&#8203;Red Pokémon Red Pokémon&#8204;Blue Pokémon Blue Pokémon&#8205;Yellow Pokémon Yellow Pokémon&#8206;Gold Pokémon Gold Pokémon&#8207;Silver Pokémon Silver Pokémon&#8208;Crystal Pokémon Crystal Super Star Wars&#8203; Super Star Wars Super Star Wars&#8204;- The Empire Strikes Back Super Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back Super Star Wars&#8205;- Return of the Jedi Super Star Wars - Return of the Jedi Spyro&#8203;the Dragon Spyro the Dragon Spyro&#8204;2: Ripto's Rage! Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! Spyro&#8205;: Year of the Dragon Spyro: Year of the Dragon

I highly recommend the workbench theme from Rookervik: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5552/release-amiga-workbench-emulationstation-theme

It's my daily driver! Clean and easy to read with a pixelated touch. My favorite thing about it is that lots of info is shown at the same time and stuff rarely gets cut from the side on a CRT.

Also, if you say you're using a CRT, I just wanted to link you a cool little script I use to set the overscan: https://github.com/ukscone/set_overscan
Super useful, play around with the disable_overscan and overscan_scale values to make sure the system does what you want.

@TMNTturtlguy I've replied on the ticket. Exit es if building from source. Swap shouldn't fail if being used heavily. Sounds like sd card problems, but could be os. I don't want to add more swap as it would mean large swap file being created when not needed in many cases (with the current calculated swap size code).

@TMNTturtlguy it will act as a black screensaver by default, even with the star set. The condition for the screensaver is just "if setting is different to fade, then do black" which is give as there are only two options there :)

Just one more thing on this subject...

This piece of code here...is it possible to add a image to the background? (of the actual text)....so instead of the background colour, add a background image instead?

<text name="systemInfo"> <pos>0.010 0.1465</pos> <size>0.980 0.050</size> <backgroundColor>FFFFFF00</backgroundColor> <color>ffffff00</color> <fontPath>./art/montserrat-regular-webfont.ttf</fontPath> <fontSize>0.02</fontSize> </text>

@kevin-b Go to this article to scroll down to United Kingdom then match up that key with your us keyboard - should be near your enter key - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#United_Kingdom its the Tilda I think.

Basicly you have to edit the gamelist.xml for each rom
Here is a example for a game entry in a gamelist.xml (using a video preview):

<game> <path>./1944.zip</path> <name>1944 - the loop master (000620 USA)</name> <desc>1944 - the loop master (000620 USA)</desc> <video>/home/pi/Games/config/videos/1944.xmv</video> <marquee>/home/pi/Games/config/marquees/1944.png</marquee> <rating>0.5</rating> <releasedate>20000101T000000</releasedate> <developer>Capcom / 8ing / Raizing</developer> <publisher>2000 Capcom / 8ing / Raizing</publisher> <genre>Shooter / Flying Vertical</genre> <players></players> </game>

Basicly you have to edit/add the video tag! Insert the path to your video file into

<video>path/here</video>

For more information, here are some usefull links:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4820/video-preview-in-emulationstation/27

(pls think about it before following the steps as these informations might be wrong)

Long update, but I resolved this issue using the Mayflash Wireless Sensor Bar (https://www.amazon.ca/Mayflash-W010-Wireless-Sensor-DolphinBar/dp/B00HZWEB74/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1525130286&sr=1-3&keywords=mayflash+wii), which circumvents the pesky control configurations.

Thanks, everybody!