[Theme] gameOS for Pegasus

PlayingKarrde

@herb_fargus I previously used skraper and when I did I had to manually add each launch command yes.

However, ive since switched to LaunchBox and simply using that for all my setup and scraping and just enabled the LaunchBox integration in the data sources.

I plan on doing a tutorial at some point although if you're familiar with LaunchBox it's very easy to get going.

herb_fargus

@PlayingKarrde I figured that would probably be the case. I've never used launchbox though I hear it's pretty popular, I'll probably give it a go one of these days. I like starting from scratch just so I understand the process.

For my current workflow, I use skraper to generate assets, then run the dat through fluffypillow's conversion tool and then manually add the launch code and just toggle the skraper source in pegasus and it seems to work, I tried doing two metadata.txt files - one in the config folder with the launch parameters and one in the game folder with all the rest of the game info but looks like pegasus will only read one metadata.txt file which makes sense.

PlayingKarrde

@herb_fargus I think it used to read a collections.txt file from the config folder if you want to keep all that info together. I'm not sure if that is still working tho (@fluffypillow would be able to say better than I).

herb_fargus

@PlayingKarrde looks like it will still be something under metadata now as collections were merged into the metadata.txt but in any case this is more pegasus specific stuff that I'll just carry over at discord and leave this thread to your theme, thanks for the info.

AndersHP

@PlayingKarrde

@PlayingKarrde said in [Theme] gameOS for Pegasus:

maybe I could simply add a toggle for small screens that enlarges everything (and sets the column count to 2 or 3 or whatever).

That sounds great!

fluffypillow

@herb_fargus I think this kind of setup should work too, yes, but feel free to open an issue in case Pegasus acts weird :)

anothersong42

I've seen this question mentioned before in a few threads but I still cannot figure out a solution. I cannot get the Pegasus frontend to recognize any themes that I place in the themes folder.

I'm running the Pegasus frontend installed from RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I've downloaded the theme GameOS from Github and placed it into the ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/themes/ directory. I've also renamed the folder to GameOS from GameOS-master, as per the instructions, but still no luck. I've also tried this with a slightly altered version of the Pegasus grid theme as well. Any advice on how to get Pegasus to recognize themes on a Raspberry Pi would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ryan

PlayingKarrde

I think per the instructions here you should be putting it int pegasus-frontend/config/themes perhaps?

anothersong42

@PlayingKarrde Thank you for such a quick response! Unfortunately, I have also tried putting themes into ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/config/themes/ but they still do not show up in the menu theme selection option. Is there another location other than ~/.config and /root where pegasus is located?

PlayingKarrde

@anothersong42 Unfortunately I don't have a retropie setup that I can test right now but I don't recall it being tricky when I did set one up. @fluffypillow maybe you can weigh in on this one?

hooperre

@anothersong42 said in [Theme] gameOS for Pegasus:

@PlayingKarrde Thank you for such a quick response! Unfortunately, I have also tried putting themes into ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/config/themes/ but they still do not show up in the menu theme selection option. Is there another location other than ~/.config and /root where pegasus is located?

Try: /opt/retropie/configs/all/pegasus-fe/themes

anothersong42

@hooperre & @PlayingKarrde Thank you for the quick replies and suggestions. I got the themes to be recognized by creating a few folders (/config/themes) at this location: /opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-fe/config/themes/.

fluffypillow

Hm yes, the default theme directory should be ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/themes/ on Raspberries too. If installed through RetroPie ~/.config/pegasus-frontend/ is a symlink to some internal directory, but that shouldn't cause problems. If it still doesn't work, here you can find the list of all supported config directory locations.

rajbhalsod

Hello there. I really like the theme and how it looks and will use it for one of my pi builds. Out of interest, I installed it on windows and it can see, for example, my SNES roms. When I try to launch a rom through Pegasus, it exits the program completely. I've also tried it with the NES emulator but still get the same problem. I'm using the snes9x and nestopia emulators.

Any ideas as to what I might be doing wrong?

PlayingKarrde

@rajbhalsod Would you be able to post your lastrun.log file?

rajbhalsod

@PlayingKarrde Hi, I managed to get the games loading through RetroArch. One last question, any suggestions as to how I can scrape art? I've Skraper and UXML Scraper but just can't seem to figure it out when scraping for the PC.

Thanks once again.

PlayingKarrde

@rajbhalsod If you're on Windows I tend to recommend using LaunchBox to scrape for metadata now. It's much easier to set up and the quality of the content I find is higher. You will need to set Launchbox as a source within Pegasus for it to show up but it's very straight forward.

I intend to put together a video tutorial at some point but it likely won't be until the new year now.

rajbhalsod

@PlayingKarrde Hi thank you for the reply. Yesterday night I managed to get Skraper to scrape all art (boxart, wheel and videos) for the SNES. However, when I launch Pegasus, it shows the wheel art and video snap but not the box art or the game description. I will continue to experiment and try out different settings in Skraper and let you know how I get on.

Kudos on an excellent looking front end. Once I get it fully configured on my PC, I will install it on three of my pi builds too and test it on the pi4 too.

tekn0

This theme is absolutely fantastic! Thank you for creating it. :) After much trial and error, I was finally able to get the media assets working though an emulation station XML on the Pi3B. I wanted to share my findings to help others.

I was having the same issue with marquee's vs logos as previous posters. My emulation station XML was populated with metadata that looked like this for media assets.

<image>./boxart/After Burner (Japan, USA).png</image>
<marquee>./wheel/After Burner (Japan, USA).png</marquee>
<video>./snap/After Burner (Japan, USA).mp4</video>

Then I did a find-replace with notepad++ to make it like this.

<image>./media/images/After Burner (Japan, USA).png</image>
<marquee>./media/marquee/After Burner (Japan, USA).png</marquee>
<video>./media/videos/After Burner (Japan, USA).mp4</video>

Next, I created the following folders in the ROMs dir. They needed to be named exactly as follows:

This was the box art
./media/images/
This was for preview videos (Performance on 480p worked fine)
./media/videos/
This is where the transparent "marquees/logos" go (It seems to translate the marquee dir from XML into logo)
./media/wheel/
This is where the static game screenshots go. (must be "screenshot" NOT "screenshots")
./media/screenshot/

Lastly, enable both ES and Skraper in the settings menu for data sources.

I was able to match all assets to the theme showcase video posted above this way. I never tried any fanart. This also works in the default theme as well.

Now the only issue is performance. On small systems like Sega 32X performance was decent on a Pi3B. A bit laggy but it looks so good I didn't mind much. Larger Roms sets like complete NES looked to almost buffer overflow. After scrolling down a bit the game grid starts to freeze and becomes completely unresponsive. The text starts to disappear and such. I thought this might be related to the videos so I disabled them, but it also happens with just screenshots.

I thought this might be from the ES XML translation, so I tried to convert the XML to native "metadata.txt" format but I was never able to get the front end or theme to recognize that data using the online converter tool. I really hope this info is helpful as the content presented in this frontend and theme is really wonderful and I thank all the devs involved.

tekn0

Just a quick update. I am personally getting better performance on the Pi3B using the older "Version 0.6.6" then the latest version (6.7.1) of the theme. The latest (6.7.1) crashes and freezes after scrolling for a few seconds. Version 6.6 gets a bit slower but does not freeze up.