I got it working, basically. inputFolder=, et al, were the answer.

.skyscraper/config.ini:

# ... [pcengine] # use "tg16" folders for pce/tg16 titles inputFolder="/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/tg16" gameListFolder="/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/tg16" mediaFolder="/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/tg16" cacheFolder="/home/pi/.skyscraper/cache/tg16" # importFolder="/home/pi/.skyscraper/import/tg16" # ...

Then I moved everything around in my filesystem to match these changes.

This allowed me to point .emulationstation/es_systems.cfg at the roms/tg16 folder and still have the gamelists display correctly in ES. I did have to clear out the tg16 videos from my media folder (symlinked to ones in cache/pcengine that no longer exist) and build the gamelist one more time to fix the links but after that, it works fine!

cacheFolder and importFolder don't really affect the gamelist end result, I just included them so that if a proper tg16 platform ever is added, everything will already be in the right place. (Edit: Setting importFolder gave me an error that the path does not exist when I tried to --cache edit on a rom. Even though it doesn't exist for any of the other systems either, but since this one is defined specifically I guess it really wants it to exist. Commenting out that line eliminated the error.)

There was one more hitch. The runcommand launch art doesn't use the <image> file defined in the gamelist, but rather looks for a file matching the rom's name, in a folder matching the system name called by the run command (in es_systems.cfg). The original solution, that I had done with Genesis/Megadrive, was just to symlink the media folder to one matching the run command named system. But in the interest of completeness, I now decided to go the other route and just change the run command to call the proper system instead. So I changed _SYS_ pcengine to _SYS_ tg16 and then all I had to do was copy the /opt/retropie/configs/pcengine folder to tg16 (symlinked, so as not to duplicate data unnecessarily. I could have just renamed them, but keeping the links intact for the config and rom folders, allows me to retain the dual nature of the systems, while simultaneously keeping it hidden beneath the surface.)

Now I guess the only problem is it works so well on the surface, I keep forgetting and trying to use -p tg16 by accident :-S

Edit: well there was a little more under the hood work involved in getting the system(s) fully switched over. Both emulators.cfg and retroarch.cfg reference a system folder, so I scrapped the symlinks and just renamed the config folders, then replaced all instances of "megadrive" or "pcengine" with "genesis" and "tg16" in those files. Bonus: I learned about the sed command:

sed 's/<old_text>/<new_text>/g' <file>

e.g.

sed 's/\/pcengine\//\/tg16\//g' emulators.cfg

...prints the result to stdout. (I wanted to match the string /pcengine/ and not just pcengine just in case it was in an emulator's name or something. It looks like they all just said "pce" but it doesn't hurt to make sure.)

You can pipe it to an output file with > <file> e.g.

sed 's/\/pcengine\//\/tg16\//g' emulators.cfg > emulators.cfg.new

...or

sed -i 's/\/pcengine\//\/tg16\//g' emulators.cfg

...modifies the original file with -i or --in-place.

@ecto It's a neat idea, but I'm not sure that really works for me. I really want to be able to hand the completed Retropie over as a stand alone solution.

@everyone else...
I've been doing some searching and reading. It appears that this has been suggested several times before. But from what I gather, EmulationStation lacks a window manager that any existing pdf manager will be expecting.
So, if a pdf reader is too difficult, how about a full screen picture viewer?
Sure, storing text instructions & images as an image is going to take up more space than a pdf. But mostly these are going to be scanned images of the instructions that shipped with the game in the first place.

@del1verance Hi, well, good question... If you try displaying it directly on the terminal you're logged into the RPI? (for example cat log.txt)

Just to be sure, did you configure the marquees <marquee>.....</marquee> in the gamelist.xml?

The fact that there's output in the log.txt file is that emulationstation is sending the information about the marquees, we need to figure out if it is the proper information (marquee image path) or not.

@dankcushions I understand.

@lilbud Ohhh... I see... I hipe you get back soon man

You can always bypass software and just splice together a cable that combines the stereo audio channels into one output. Just strip the left and right channel wires, wire the grounds together, solder a 1kΩ resistor to the end of each audio channel and combine them together to get a solid mono output from a stereo source.

0_1519062531787_Screen Shot 2018-02-19 at 12.38.47 PM.jpg

@dodoremi10010 you may want to look at the ODROID Xu4, it just recently got a full version of Retropie and so far in tests it can play a lot of the Dreamweaver, N64 and PSP games that you never could on a RPi

@dankcushions NVM than

as soon as i get home im going to fill out everything that can be helpfull

@ectoone these are all good ideas and I will look into them.

@jdrassa
As part of the theming-refactoring, I have started to split out the carousel into it's own GuiComponent-based class.

This gets complicated real quickly, as the carousel should also take care of member population, input handling (incl the texture loading/unloading), so I had dropped it again for now. Things move slow enough as it is X-).

But anyway, if you want me to send you the stubs, let me know.

Btw: if I read the OP correctly, this also is a CR for an 'automatic' carousel, in the sense that it will move through the contained members on a time interval?

@ruckage just wanted to give you a heads up. I have finally wrapped up adding rotation support for themes. You can read about it here

@Keigan I take full responsibility

@jdrassa This method seems to work great if the UI modes are not in use but if it's set into Kiosk mode the es_settings.cfg reverts to an unmodified state after reboot. Does enabling the Kiosk mode overwrite the es_settings.cfg file? If so can I modify the Kiosk mode to include the splash screen setting?

@dodoremi10010 said in [Request] SMBX With Wine port.:

SMBX

I have my doubts about being able to use it with wine, but if you really want to play it with your friends on your TV you can install Moonlight to stream it from your PC if you have a NVIDIA GPU

@Tao I know, I am a Linux user and I also know Opensource is not the same as free software