EmulationStation mod

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 ah brilliant! Will test now.

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 works great, the one issue I've been having is it wont refresh the gamelists once I add more roms to the romfolder so all I see is just ports and the retropie menu even though I have snes roms in the snes folder, I'm testing it on my pc so it may be something I've done with my setup, can anyone else confirm?

jacobfk20

@herb_fargus Are you saying that Super Nintendo isn't even showing up on System View?

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 actually nvm, for some reason it was creating an es_systems.cfg file in the .emulationstation folder rather than /etc/emulationstation I just had to delete the one in .emulationstation and it now shows up as it should. might be the way the module is coded perhaps, I'll have to look further into that.

jacobfk20

It does create an es_systems in .emulationstation. It writes which view mode, size of grid tiles, and if the system should show up on system view.

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 I see. well that may cause some confusion as it will take the .emulationstation folder over the /etc/emulationstation where the retropie scripts will generate the es_systems.cfg in the /etc location anytime you add a new system so I'm not sure what the best way is to address that

I presume this is a result of the save and apply button rather than just having a save button that caches it on restart

jacobfk20

That is pretty bad. I could have these settings saved in another file and keep es_systems alone.

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 I think that may be wise (albeit likely more work for you). Anyways this forum post is getting pretty long I prefer to keep development discussion on github where its closer to the code. I'll log an issue for this on your RPI repo and carry it on there.

jacobfk20

@herb_fargus I'm working mostly from https://github.com/jacobfk20/EmulationStation and not the RPiE fork.

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 If you'd like to enable the issue tracker on your emulationstation fork I'd be happy to log the issues there instead

jacobfk20

I didn't know it was disabled. It's enabled now.

robertybob

I hope this makes it into RetroPie 4 in some form, the grid view will keep me happy until Attract-Mode is finally, officially, included as a choice alongside ES!

ben_thatmustbeme

@robertybob given that RC images are out, I don't think that's likely, but I don't know the release procedure. I think it's more likely to get a script to change ES versions

meleu

Just for curiosity:
Could changing from xml to another database avoid/minimize this problem?
(exit emulationstation take ages when "save metadata on exit" is on)

jacobfk20

@meleu Probably. Wouldn't have to dump metadata to a file on exit anymore. A db would keep everything up to date as it is modified.

meleu

@jacobfk20
Then you guys have here one more vote to go ahead with this changing... :-)

jacobfk20

@meleu It would be interesting to test that out.

herb_fargus

@jacobfk20 there are a couple things to consider on that front, in the past a bit of testing has been done and response times are somewhat comparable and it seemed that the only real benefit for a SQL backend came for the rom hoarders who have like 20,000 games. Im also not sure if gamelists/scrapes are included in that or still stay as separate xmls? Anyways there is more testing to be done on that front and would be interesting to see the results.

The other semi-related thing is the white screen of death issue that is prolific with any themes that are 1080p with unique wallpapers. If there were a way to load each system dynamically kinda like you've tried to do with the grid boxart that would open up more variety of themes but I don't know how extensive code changes for that would be

jacobfk20

@herb_fargus I'm glad to see that it has been attempted. I need to take a closer look at metadata sometime still. GridView's dynamic loading will get better and I will see what happens when I apply something similar to system view.

Arcuza

How much resources do SQLite/MariaDB consume? Memory, CPU, Power? Should the daemon be kept running in the background when firing up an emulator, or should it be started, shut down, started, shut down?

DBs are mainly for very large datasets (some of them have 100 different algorithms for sorting data fast, depending on how you want the data sorted). We don't need that?

DBs are built with transactional integrity in mind. We don't need that?

DBs are built for multiple concurrent connections. We don't need that?

DBs are built for network access, with security, access control, logins and such. We don't need that?

When I develop on Windows .Net has really great features for dealing with XML and datasets. I vote for finding such a library to work with if you want to load static data, change something and write it back.

DBs consume too much resources because they are build for very heavy and complicated situations.

Writing 1 MB of XML data from a dataset should take no more than 10 ms. Just like any other 1 MB file.