Edit Emulation Station menus?

nc4080

Hi All,

First off, great community...

I'm looking for a way to edit or limit the various Emulation Station menus. For example, I would like to remove the default scraper from the (start) menu so it does not accidentally get activated when someone else is using the unit.

There are other menu items such as the 'Configure Controller' menu which I find great for initially setting up the unit but not so good when someone accidentally presses it. Is there a way to 'cut down' or modify the menu options within Emulation Station?

Cheers,

Floob

Not really.

This may help though:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation

RetroResolution

@nc4080 I've only had a very quick look at this, but it looks likely that you could recompile Emulation Station from source, after editing:
GuiMenu.cpp

Unfortunately it's not possible to search the code of a forked repository on github (RetroPie uses a fork of the Aloshi EmulationStation project), but I located the menu code on the parent branch, here:

https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/blob/646bede3d9ec0acf0ae378415edac136774a66c5/es-app/src/guis/GuiMenu.cpp

The menus look hard-wired, not config driven, for example:

addEntry("SCRAPER", 0x777777FF, true,
addEntry("SOUND SETTINGS", 0x777777FF, true,
addEntry("UI SETTINGS", 0x777777FF, true,
addEntry("CONFIGURE INPUT", 0x777777FF, true,

nc4080

Thanks guys.

@Floob I installed the experimental emulationstation-kid package as per your suggestion https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation. It took a while to install but looks like it successfully completed as I can see from the emulationstation main menu (by pressing Start) that it now shows 'EMULATIONSTATON V2.0.1A_GUI-MODES-V7'.

The only issue I had was when I changed the UI mode from 'FULL' to 'KIOSK' then confirmed it by pressing 'BACK' emulationstation just crashes back to the terminal. To solve this I have to edit (after shutting down emulationstation /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_settings.cfg by changing the line <string name="UIMode" value="Full" /> to <string name="UIMode" value="Kiosk" />

So far emulationstation in kiosk mode seems to be working after several reboots, shutdowns and game launches.

Will keep you updated.

nc4080

I've just noticed that I get an error when trying to start a system that has its roms in sub folders. The sub folders are not displayed for that system and crashes when you press 'A'. For example: my roms were in 'roms\snes\Europe' and I had to move them back to 'roms\snes'.
Once i moved the roms and re-scraped them using SSelph's, the SNES roms booted ok.

Floob

@nc4080 Yes, you may see some similar issues in the video on the Wiki page.
As it mentions, it is experimental and may have a few issues still.

The existing Emulation Station front end is very stable, so you may want to stick with that.
Or you could try another (unsupported) front end like Attract Mode.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/93/attract-mode-with-retropie-alternative-to-emulationstation/

Zigurana

Hey, I wrote the edits that make up the kid-kiosk fork of ES.

There is another thread on the issue of game-list population in the case of subfolders within systems. As a result of that, I am rewriting the way this filtering for kid games or hidden games is being done. As always, I have little time to work on this, so the update might take a while.

Take into account that the logic for populating lists of games is spread out over many different files, and it is very easy to break. For instance, it is easy to set some combination of favorites and hidden games that result in no games to visualize. This will generally crash ES. ES is not very robust against these type of things, hence the redesign.

For now, try and stick to just a single level for each system (no subfolders) and make sure there are kid-games defined BEFORE you switch to that mode. There are some (limited) checks to see if there is still something to show, but as has become abundantly clear, there are still many holes to patch.

If anyone feels he/she can contribute to the project, pull requests are more than welcome!

nc4080

@Zigurana Thanks for the feedback. I ended up dumping all roms into the default folder for that system. I'm only using Kiosk mode and I found that after doing (ANOTHER) clean install of Retropie 3.8.1 and installing the ES-kid experimental package directly afterwards, I was able to change into Kiosk mode from the ES front end this time without ES crashing. The crashing on my previous install could have been attributed to something else that was done in RP / ES.
I think placing all roms in the default system folder is a small price to pay for a great feature like Kiosk mode. Glad to keep testing this experimental package and will continue to report on any bugs found along the way. Keep up the good work.