mehstation with RetroPie - Alternative to EmulationStation front end

pompitousofseth

I was talking about using the controllers to control the frontend itself. I'm excited about mehstation I will just have to wait for more work on it.

Brigane

Mehstation seems quite interesting, far more than Attract Mode imo. I'm looking forward to more updates on this. Thanks for making this happening @Floob

herb_fargus

@Floob great video. Another frontend just got a beta release: Phoenix

https://m.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/4nfl6h/introducing_phoenix_a_slick_new_multisystem/

Basically an opensource openemu. Supposedly it should compile for the pi but I'm guessing at this point will need X as it uses qt5 and also likely won't have great performance. But just another frontend we can throw on the pile of potential candidates ;)

Floob

@herb_fargus Wow - thats great, they are lining up to replace Emulation Station!

So there must now be at least the following options:

RetroFE
http://www.retrofe.com/

mehstation
https://remy.io/mehstation

Attract Mode
http://attractmode.org/

Phoenix
http://phoenix.vg/

lilbud

Phoenix reminds me of that Retro FX project from the old fourm

remeh

Hi!

mehstation developer here.
First thing, thanks a lot Floob for the video! Means a lot to me!
I'm so, so sad that you did the test while there is this incredibily ridiculous bug on inputs in the git repository... It simply destroys the whole user experience, sorry for that, I've planned to dig into this problem this week.

You perfectly explained the differents binaries (mehstation & mehtadata don't need X, mehstation-config does, etc.) and I've wanted to comment to complete on the configuration part and on my plan for this feature.

Actually, mehstation is using an SQLite database for all the emulators, games, etc. configuration. This database is as you said, configurable with mehstation-config. I think this fill an existing use-case: having a graphical tool to configure all your assets, one time, and coming back to it from time to time to add more assets / games / whatever.
It needs X, but you don't need to boot it often, and you have a completely graphical app and easy-to-use for configuration. (I know, it's not yet completely easy to use ;) but the features are here and a lot of tweakings / adding wizards and helpers here and there need now to be done).

Now, the second use-case would be the one mainly represented by RetroPie, what I would call the "scan directories for games" mode: the content of these directories drive the content of your frontend.
It's really effective because: you don't need X to change the content of your frontend, it's automatic; it's a bit more restrictive because: you need to configure your assets directly into the frontend and it can be a pita with a gamepad.

My plan are to support both these use cases, in some steps:

I already have a working version of mehstation scanning directory for games and automatically displaying them in the frontend, that's done and it works very well.
I now need to add some CLI commands to mehstation to add platforms/emulators directly from CLI. Once this finished, it'll be functional but ugly because mehstation will fallback on black background, etc. Still, it's using the SQLite internally and mehstation-config can be use, but he, we want to remove X ! ;)
The final step, which will need some dev, is to add directly into the frontend mehstation the needed menus to add the assets, configure things and launch the scraping. This way, mehstation-config and X won't be mandatory anymore but will still be available for aficionados of graphical configuration apps.

I'm close to have finished the step 2 and I plan to release mehstation 1.1. Then, I'll move to step 3 and release mehstation 1.2.
But first, I MUST fix this awful input bug that you have in the video...

Floob

@remeh Thanks very much for the feedback remeh. Thats really interesting to see the areas you are focusing on.
I'm more than happy to make another video when you think its ready.

I'll probably add steps into the next video to show all users how to go about installing mehstation onto a RetroPie setup.

herb_fargus

@Floob I had created a module a bit back here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/1071#issuecomment-196049553 but it's a little incomplete and needs to be updated to the new menu layout so perhaps I'll look at updating it when I've got some time. We could probably get a working module added to zerojays RetroPie extra repository while mehstation is still in dev

Floob

@herb_fargus Great, that sounds good.
I'll see if @zerojay can hook it into his repository once remeh has made the relevant changes.

zerojay

I already do have a mehstation module, but sure.