EmulationStation Marquee Bug (with work-around)

roslof

[Issue exists with stable ES and experimental ES]

I always find the weird bugs... :) This one for EmulationStation appears to be reproduceable on all themes, including Carbon.

I noticed that a few of my systems were missing marquees, even though they were properly linked in their gamelist.xml file. They also had proper permissions. ES's Gamelist View Style UI setting had no affect. Auto was thoroughly tested.

After spending a day banging my head against a wall, I finally figured it out. None of those systems on my Pi contained any scraped videos.

The Bug: If a system does not reference at least one (1) video file in its gamelist.xml, marquees will not render.

So, to work-around this issue, just add at least one (1) video reference. I suspect this has been an issue for quite a while.

mitu

Looks like a bug. Marquees have only been 'recently' (I think last year) added to the Detailed view, so probably haven't seen much exposure/usage.

roslof

@mitu said in EmulationStation Marquee Bug (with work-around):

Looks like a bug. Marquees have only been 'recently' (I think last year) added to the Detailed view, so probably haven't seen much exposure/usage.

I went ahead and opened and issue. I suspect this has been around for awhile, and nobody is clamoring. Probably because I might be one of the few who work with systems without videos.

pjft

@roslof I didn't even know they had been added to detailed view at some point, I was very much under the impression they were still only available on video.

Question: does it also happen if you force select gamelist view as video? I assume from your comment that "yes" but want to confirm that you explicitly chose video.

roslof

@pjft said in EmulationStation Marquee Bug (with work-around):

Question: does it also happen if you force select gamelist view as video?

That's correct. Marquees will appear if gamelist view is set to video. This is the only way to get them to appear if no video files are referenced in the gamelist.xml.

pjft

@roslof this is consistent with what I remember. Marquees are supported in video view, but if you have no videos, the automatic detection will not select video view so you won't see them.

While I don't recall them being added to detailed view, if they should indeed show in detailed view, if you explicitly select detailed view they should show up.

Now, with this context, this is the reason why they don't show up. What happens is that, if there are no videos, ES will not show the game lists in video mode, and will rather default to the next view (detailed, I'd expect). That's why you don't see them, and I wouldn't call this detection logic a bug - video mode should only show if you have videos. By adding a fair video entry, you're tricking the detection logic to show the video view. That's consistent. Also, selecting video view does the same, which is expected.

If marquees should be rendered in detailed view and detailed view is not getting selected as a fallback even though you have them, then yes, that's a bug. But, as I said, I do not remember this being a thing.

If not, I would consider this a feature request which is all about adding marquee support to other views.

mitu

@pjft said in EmulationStation Marquee Bug (with work-around):

If marquees should be rendered in detailed view and detailed view is not getting selected as a fallback even though you have them, then yes, that's a bug. But, as I said, I do not remember this being a thing.

Wasn't marquee support added for detailed view in https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/634 ? Maybe it's not working correctly now.

pjft

@mitu So it seems. @roslof can you confirm whether explicitly selecting "Detailed" also shows marquees?

mitu

@pjft said in EmulationStation Marquee Bug (with work-around):

@roslof can you confirm whether explicitly selecting "Detailed" also shows marquees?

It doesn't, I tested it also and it's not showing when using Detailed only.

pjft

@mitu Well, that's... unexpected. :)

mitu

Looking again over this issue, I think the problem is that the Carbon theme's Detailed view doesn't support the marquee tag and that's why is not shown. So it's not a bug in ES, but rather a theme issue.

EDIT: Try the Magazine Madness theme, it has support for marquees in Detailed view.

roslof

@mitu said in EmulationStation Marquee Bug (with work-around):

EDIT: Try the Magazine Madness theme, it has support for marquees in Detailed view.

You're correct @mitu. Just tried in both Detailed and Automatic views and without videos referenced, the marquees do indeed appear.

For each theme I used that exhibits the problem, the marquee section is under <view name = "video">. Updating the themes, including Carbon, by moving the marquee section under <view name = "Detailed"> works (and would seem to be a more common scenario).

Seems that many themes used Carbon as a baseline and have marquee under the video view section. Easy to fix (or change, if it was what the author intended).

Thank you, as always.