EmulationStation Fork?

dankcushions

Herdinger's fork hadn't had a commit in a month and those were very few, it's not what I would call active development at all.

i think that describes almost every git emulation project i follow! they're still working on it: https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/563#issuecomment-229388606

The difference between me and Aloshi, Herdinger, etc is I WANT to give out git access o anyone else committed to the project.

sorry but herdinger's project has more than one maintainer. they're not limiting access. they asked for your help above.

(i don't really care what ES fork people work on - all work is good!)

Zigurana

@ben_thatmustbeme : Its good to see that at least you have given these things some thought.

Some remarks though: I do not think that a single month of inactivity means that the project is inactive, and I would urge you contact the Herdinger ppl to see if there is room for a common way forward.

I have no real opinion as to switching to a new project name or not. there are advantages and disadvantages. You gain a fresh start, but lose recognizability.

Botolo

I know ES is mature and is probably the only real option to grow, for the moment at least.
That's why I think it's important to choose one project/fork/clone and keep an official focus on it.

I'm new here so I don't pretend to suggest anything. I don't know you, how you work and how good are you. It's simply not my place to say anything about what has been done so far.

I'm simply willing to help whatever the majority choose to do :)

ben_thatmustbeme

Yes Herdinger has said he is still interested but does not have time right now. To me, that equates to no active leadership to a project. Herdinger is also saying that they need unit tests as first priority, which is a good thing to add, but not really how you get new people interested in a project.

Don't get me wrong, I am reviewing every difference between Herdinger branch and my own. And bringing in any of them that don't break on the pie. There are some good additions in there and it's a pretty easy task to merge changes between them.

As far as project stewardship i'd certainly be happy to keep it under retropie's control. I think that makes a lot of sense for centralization and long term maintainability. But let's start out externally and see if we can maintain a stable level before suggesting anything like that. Note that a name change is a matter of a single text document. I forked from retropie's code base, so it would be trivial to make a PR to a branch under that.

Honestly, there is no reason to not have multiple forks, especially since I am going to focus mainly on retropie. Retropie's version has already diverged from Herdinger's in a few ways before I start changing anything. Herdinger can deal with the extra work of maintaining on multiple os's, by focusing on pie, a small dev team becomes realistic for maintaining a project.

ZombieRobot

I'm keen to help in any way i can.
I don't have any programming skills but have a background in coding skins for kodi and i'm sure i can handle some bug testing if a fork gets off the ground again and would love to see some more flexibility in the theming department mainly the ability to add a second or third image in relation to the current focused game (See Here) fingers crossed we can getsome momentum behind this awesome project again.

herb_fargus

@ben_thatmustbeme just remember that RetroPie can also be installed on a Linux pc so it would be useful to maintain compatibility with both platforms.

ben_thatmustbeme

@herb_fargus certainly. That won't be an issue. Especially since my home machine is Gentoo Linux and that's where all my development will really happen.

Keigan

If anything, can we lose the white bar on the systems select menu? When theming it's the most annoying part considering you cannot remove it and have to try and implement into the design.

Also when using the slide option, instead of getting to the far right and having it go left to the start, can it endlessly loop around?

And allowing more images and such in the gameslist, for screen shots, etc. This is also for theming if people care to use it.

Those would be things I'd like to see, but if you change the whole thing, and have the grid, option, etc these likely won't even be an issue.

Thanks,

pcal

Hi. Sorry to necro the thread but I'm also interested in the future of EmulationStation development. I recently made a fork to add a small enhancement that I wanted:

https://github.com/pcal43/EmulationStation

I'd be interested in contributing this and other fixes but it doesn't really seem like there's a place for them to go.

lilbud

@pcal what did you do specifically?

suprjami

@pcal: aiui we're accepting well-tested PRs which do not add/change major functionality against https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation

This is more of a stable/maintenance branch for RetroPie than any sort of forward-thinking development branch

Unless someone steps up and truly takes over ES development, compiles all the little mods out there into one stable tree, and stewards the project and its community moving forward, major ES changes are unlikely to occur

@lilbud look at the changelog:

https://github.com/pcal43/EmulationStation/commit/a9e801c6ff53559f29e86bd2128d24a677d284f2

lilbud

Could you explain this in English? I don't speak code

suprjami

@lilbud

add support for 'collapsing' games that live in their own directory

I guess that if a game is like:

roms/psx/Castlevania SotN/Castlevania SotN.bin
roms/psx/Castlevania SotN/Castlevania SotN.cue

Then you can collapse it down to just have one neat menu entry for that game, instead of having to go into the directory and then launch the game.

pcal

Then you can collapse it down to just have one neat menu entry for that game, instead of having to go into the directory and then launch the game.

Yes, exactly.

Some of those PSX games have lots of files (20+) and merging them into an .iso doesn't always work. I really don't like tossing all of those files from different games in the same directory. I guess I'm kind of OCD about stuff like this. :)

Anyway. So, yes, an extremely minor change. :) But I'm happy to clean it up and submit it to the RetroPie branch if there's interest.

herb_fargus

@pcal that's the main reason we removed bin as an extension from psx. Just a diff way of filtering. You can submit your case on the RetroPie github fork of emulationstation for discussion

suprjami

@pcal Another way to work around this is to use PSX2PSP files:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Playstation-1#multi-disc-games-or-cd-image-not-working

pcal

Thanks for the replies everyone

@pcal that's the main reason we removed bin as an extension from psx. Just a diff way of filtering.

Right. Which totally makes sense.

I just wanted to take it a step further, giving myself the option to keep each game in a subfolder on disk while having them appear at the top level in the ES menus

Another way to work around this is to use PSX2PSP files:

Ah, that's an interesting trick, didn't think of that.

You can submit your case on the RetroPie github fork of emulationstation for discussion

Ok. Let me clean up my change and I'll try to get a pull request submitted this weekend.

vbs

Regarding the PSX files: for me it worked for multi-bin/apes-games to merge them all into a single bin. So every game ends up with one bin and one cue.
These tips here helped me alot:
http://www.epforums.org/showthread.php?57757-ECM-And-APE-Guide
(there is a section on howto mege multiple bins to one bin)

FlyingTomahawk

Sorry to revive this old topic but I just wanted to know the current status on this whole Emulationstation stuff and I didn't think it was worth a new topic.

So what's going on? Which version/fork is now used in the current RetroPie?
Is there any change gonna happen anytime soon?
What about grid view?
What about that stupid carousel bar? Can we soon theme it?
Is there anyone out there currently maintaining an updated ES version?

Until that time, further developments are done by 'unofficial' forks, which are not necessarily maintained/updated often. One example is this extension of ES, which is currently under experimental features.

The reason I ask is all these questions is I am about to release an update for my theme and I need to know if I have to add some new features or adjust it to a newer ES version/fork. If you guys tell me that nothing is gonna happen in the next few months then I'll just continue my work as is.

herb_fargus

@FlyingTomahawk video support has already been added so that's one thing you can add to your theme