[Theme] gameOS for Pegasus

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.

rajbhalsod

Hi all, so i've been trying to scrape media for my Windows Pegasus build. I can get the logos and videos to display for each game but cannot work out how to show box art or any other meta data. Any suggestions? I've used Skraper and managed to configure it to get all of the artwork but cannot work out why the boxart is not displaying. Any help would be really really appreciated!

tekn0

@rajbhalsod

media for the theme goes in these dirs, inside of the system dir. So an example would be
nes/media/screenshot/
nes/media/box2dfront/
nes/media/wheel/
nes/media/videos/

rajbhalsod

@tekn0

That worked! Thank you so much! I can now see all the artwork. One last question if that's ok - how can I display game descriptions? I have tried doing this with Skraper but no luck. I'm assuming I may have to use a gamelist file to do this?

Thanks once again

tekn0

@rajbhalsod I'm glad it was helpful. I love this theme and have been spending a lot of time getting it running on my pi3!

Yes, you will need a gamelist.xml file or a metadata.txt file. Check out skraper. It will scan your ROMs and fill in this data for you into a gamelist.xml file. That's what I'm using currently. Then emulation station and pegasus can coexist and share data.

rajbhalsod

@tekn0

Thanks once again for getting back to me. I took some xml files from the pi build and ran them through the converter mentioned in the pegasus forum and it worked well - I now have game descriptions. Only thing though, my games are unzipped and I have to change the extensions in the metadata file for each game, e.g. from .zip to .nes for example. I tried running it through Skraper but with no luck - it doesn't seem to do anything.

Like you, I am also loving this theme, really brings the whole setup to life! I've got it running on my PC now and will continue to add more systems. I will run it on my Pi this weekend too!

Thanks once again for all your help.

xFJSx

@rajbhalsod you can also try using skraper for the gamelist.xml this will also create the gamelists with your used extensions.
Pegasus will also look for the gamelist.xml

rajbhalsod

Hi, Thank you for the reply. I'm still struggling with this. I took an N64 gamelist from the pi build and placed it in the N64 roms folder on my windows build. I then went into skraper and under the game list section, set the game path to the roms folder. I also chose emulationstation gamelist.xml from the gamelist type but still no luck. The original gamelist is not updated.

Any ideas where i could be going wrong with this?

lilbud

Is there a way to make the metadata a little bigger?

PlayingKarrde

@lilbud In layer_grid/GameGridMetaBox.qml you can modify lines 10 and 11 to change the padding.

Layout.minimumWidth: rowcontent.width + vpx(10);
Layout.minimumHeight: rowcontent.height + vpx(5);

If you want to increase everything within the box too you'll have to start adjusting each of the numbers within that file for the icon and text too (lines 30-32 and line 42).

rajbhalsod

Hello all. My Pegasus build is getting there on my windows machine. I was wondering if anyone could help me out though - I'm trying to add pc games, but cannot work out what the launch parameters should be? Each PC game that I would like to add have different .exe file names, e.g. halo.exe, etc.

Any suggestions would be massively appreciated.

Thanks,
Raj

fluffypillow

@rajbhalsod Hi, you can use {file.path} as the launch command, so the EXE will be launched directly. For example:

collection: Windows Games
launch: "{file.path}"
files:
  ./Halo/halo.exe
  ./Some Other Game/launcher.exe

rajbhalsod

Perfect - it worked!

Thank you so much for the quick response!

rajbhalsod

Final Question I promise! How can I manually add game art - I have some PC games that already have artwork in my Steam client. I would like to use the same covers for example but i'm struggling to set the correct parameters for this. Once again, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

sapient254

Does anyone know why the UI is cutoff after I install it? I have a 4K tv and an Rpi4. As soon as I launch Pegasus, it appears super zoomed in.

fluffypillow

@rajbhalsod at the moment there's no support for adding artwork to autodetected Steam games, but that will come in the future. However, you can add assets for regular games defined in a metadata file, like above. You can find more info about that here.

@sapient254 it seems at the moment the Pi 4 video driver has some troubles with certain boot config parameters and TV/HDMI settings for some displays. Here is a possible workaround for it, which might work for you too.

rajbhalsod

@fluffypillow
Hey thank you for the reply. I tried adding artwork using the guide, but couldn't seem to get it to display . I will try again. On a separate note, I've now started doing a pegasus build on my pi. I've installed the frontend correctly but when I scan for a metadata file, it does not display any games. For example, when setting up the SNES, I converted the snes metadata file into a pegasus.metadata.txt file which is seen by Pegasus but when I select it and then refresh, no games are displayed. Any idea where I could be going wrong?

Thanks again.

rajbhalsod

Hello again. I tried adding artwork manually but badly struggling to get this to work! Could you kindly provide an example of how to the metadata file should look for the artwork?

Thanks

sapient254

@fluffypillow Thanks! I was able to get it to work. Though I seem to be unable to see the gameOS theme. I created a new folder in /.config/pegasus-frontend/themes and labeled it gameOS per the instructions. However, when I reboot, load pegasus, go to settings, and try to change the theme, all that shows up is the basic grid theme. Any idea why it's not showing up?