Infoscreen for game control
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I am currently working on a project for an arcade console based on the current RetroPie version 4.8. I have designed a gamepad for 2 players, each with a joystick and 8 arcade buttons. The button layout is a bit unusual, so I have changed the button assignment for many games via the emulator (lr-mame2003).
Now I'm looking for a way to show and hide an info page while a game is running. On this info page I would like to display the button assignment defined for the current game. In the simplest case, the info page can be an image or text file that I have created with a graphics program or editor and saved in the ROM directory, for example (e.g. romname.png or romname.nfo).
It should be possible to show and hide the info page using an additional button or a hotkey combination. The game should be paused until the info page is hidden again. I have already seen that this is possible when you open the RetroArch menu.
Does anyone have any idea whether this is feasible and what direction I should look in?
Thank you very much
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M mitu moved this topic from Ideas and Development on
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It should be possible to show and hide the info page using an additional button or a hotkey combination. The game should be paused until the info page is hidden again. I have already seen that this is possible when you open the RetroArch menu.[...]Yes, but this is implemented entirely within RetroArch, whereas you want to display something external (to the emulator). You didn't mention what platform are you using - but if it's a Pi, there are not many great options and for sure not a general solution.
You can communicate with an existing RetroArch instance using the network control interface and you can tell it to stop the current emulation, but there's no 'show me this page/text' command to display arbitrary data (image/text). You can hook up arbitrary scripts using triggerhappy, already included in the Pi images.
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@mitu Many thanks for the quick feedback!
I have followed the advice on the network interface and the use of triggerhappy. I also looked into overlays in RetroArch and developed a solution. I would like to briefly explain this so that other users can also benefit from it.
First, I configured RetroArch so that content-specific overrides are loaded (if available). For each game for which an infoscreen is to be displayed, I have defined two overlay-pictures in the override. The first image is always a blank image (blank.png) and the second image shows the controls (e.g. pacman.png).
In the background, triggerhappy queries the keystroke of an unassigned button and then sends the following commands to RetroArch: OVERLAY_NEXT and PAUSE_TOGGLE. I had to program a small script to execute both commands simultaneously. Finally, I integrated the start of triggerhappy as a daemon into the boot process. Works great! :-)
If anyone has any questions or needs help, I will be happy to provide further information.
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