@mitu thanks for the reply and great suggestions I hadn't considered!

As it turns out, I was mistaken. The pacman.zip file was not in my roms folder. I won't get into the details since this is a sensitive topic (regarding legal gray areas and fair use arguments) but suffice to say, way back ~20 years when I started this hobby, I had to hunt for the original zip file and I never included it in my archive of the internet archive 0.256 rom set.

Still don't understand why it's not part of the merged roms internet archive.

@Lolonois Sorry I took so long to reply I have only just seen your reply to my previous message. If you download the source code and open it with CMake you will see an option to disable Batocera integrations. I don't now why someone has given me -1 reputation for my previous message as it works with caveats.

@mitu

Thank you for your help
One of the kids must of reset the es.system.cfg
All rom directories are pointing to /root/RetroPie and all my ROMS are /home/RetroPie. !

it is a shame I don’t know how to tweak KIOSK mode & kids mode so you can still get the benefits from using Full UI Mode

My test Ubuntu 22.04 system was also upgrade. Since 22.04 sets Wayland as default display server, you may be missing some libraries needed for CSD. Try installing the libdecor-0-plugin-1-cairo package and see if - when using Wayland - you get the same error when starting a SDL2 application (i.e. EmulationStation or gnome-terminal).

Cool idea and looks nice.

You might consider using <sortname/> [1] in the gamelist instead of modifying the display name of the ROM upon preprocessing.

What duration adds the preprocessing to the ES start?
Do you rewrite every extra information to the gamelist every time (video, thumbnail, ... and hiscores)? I would assume only rewriting the hiscores would be sufficient as they change more often than the "static" scraped data.
Last but not least: What are your plans to publish the sources?

[1] https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/master/GAMELISTS.md#game

@cdaters glad to help

This one's my favourite at the moment:

I recommend you post your splash screen here:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/29132/splash-screen-ideas-discussion

Ah nevermind. I started to look into forks and one of them is perfect. Basically the switchos theme but it supports boxart and a few other things.
https://github.com/ismaelestalayo/skylineOSP

@markyh444 AFAIK there is no source code available - just the pre-installed PI image. It uses RetroArch + the MegaDrive cores and it looks like the image is based on Raspbian, so if the author wants to give permission to re-distribute or releases the source code under a distribution permissive license, it might be possible to add it as an alternate front-end.

The limbo16 project is a 3rd party folders-support add-on for the blast16 Raspberry Pi emulator front-end:

https://sites.google.com/view/limbo16/

@mitu Of cours, but then you mess up your rom set.

On the other hand some systems or naming conventions use rom sets which have names which are not unique. (I don't find one at the moment, but i saw such discs)

e.g.
"<Game>.cue"
"Track1.bin"
"Track2.bin"

Wow, that was fast!

Thank you @mitu

@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.

@oldversions it's a request for help so it goes in help and support. I'll move it.

You can install whatever parts of retropie you like https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/

Nevermind. Moved the conv to github.

Installed the image last night, started loading my ROMS manually also.
I like the concept of the naming conventions and they way the lists are pre-generated so dropping a ROM in with the correct name, they just appear.

I changed to Robospin_v4 on the main screen as I didn't like the up/down movement go left/right.