Rotating JUST emulation station guis

joeboese619

Hi Everyone,
I've built a cocktail cabinet running 4.1. I use the 'rotate and mirror' glsl files provided by retroarch to give each side of the table an 'upright' view of multi-player games. After working on custom glsl shaders for just about every game, gameplay is working great. However I now am stuck trying to figure out how to rotate the EmulationStation GUIs without modifying the /boot/config.txt file. If I modify /boot/config.txt, I have to start all over with my glsl shaders.

I'm quite familiar with C++ development as its what do for a living. I'm also familiar with gitflow so contributing a 'rotate feature' to the emulation station repo would be something I'm totally up for.

Before you ask...

Why are you asking about emulation station dev here?
The forum at emulationstation.org seems to have died. It is covered in SPAM posts and I have been unable to get an account created over there as it is failing to send me a confirmation e-mail.
Really, isn't re-writing your glsl easier than adding a feature to Emulation Station?
Thus far no! After about 20 hours, I'm still unable to get the retroarch cocktail-cab-portrait.glsl to work for me.

My questions for you:

Is there a forum I'm unable to locate that is still actively used for emulation station dev?
I've never done any OpenGL or SDL programming. It seems like it should be pretty trivial to setup any GUI Window you are drawing to initially be rotated 90 degrees. However I've been unable to find any API which does that. I have noticed that a lot of 'things' drawn by EmulationStation are drawn using a constant Eigen::Affine3f::Identity(). I suspect changing this to be a transformation that rotates X degrees would be exactly what I need?

Thanks,
Joe

Pic of my cabinet

Zigurana

Hey @joeboese619 welcome to the forum!
#1: Your interpretation is about correct, the original creator(s) have abandoned the EmulationStation project. See the wiki for a bit of background info.
Others have taken up the development of new features for ES, see here, but also the Recalbox project has done a great amount of work.

So in short re #2:
I 'm not sure if it's currently possible, but it is certainly possible to make it happen!
Step in, push some code, and contribute something to the open-source software that allows you to relive your childhood games (and, looking at the picture, pass it on to the future generations of gamers)!

Zigurana

Btw, nice build!

KillerQ

@joeboese619 said in Rotating JUST emulation station guis:

Hi Everyone,
I've built a cocktail cabinet running 4.1. I use the 'rotate and mirror' glsl files provided by retroarch to give each side of the table an 'upright' view of multi-player games. After working on custom glsl shaders for just about every game, gameplay is working great. However I now am stuck trying to figure out how to rotate the EmulationStation GUIs without modifying the /boot/config.txt file. If I modify /boot/config.txt, I have to start all over with my glsl shaders.

I'm quite familiar with C++ development as its what do for a living. I'm also familiar with gitflow so contributing a 'rotate feature' to the emulation station repo would be something I'm totally up for.

Before you ask...

Why are you asking about emulation station dev here?
The forum at emulationstation.org seems to have died. It is covered in SPAM posts and I have been unable to get an account created over there as it is failing to send me a confirmation e-mail.

Really, isn't re-writing your glsl easier than adding a feature to Emulation Station?
Thus far no! After about 20 hours, I'm still unable to get the retroarch cocktail-cab-portrait.glsl to work for me.

My questions for you:

Is there a forum I'm unable to locate that is still actively used for emulation station dev?

I've never done any OpenGL or SDL programming. It seems like it should be pretty trivial to setup any GUI Window you are drawing to initially be rotated 90 degrees. However I've been unable to find any API which does that. I have noticed that a lot of 'things' drawn by EmulationStation are drawn using a constant Eigen::Affine3f::Identity(). I suspect changing this to be a transformation that rotates X degrees would be exactly what I need?

Thanks,
Joe

Joe, I'm in the EXACT same predicament, except I'm running a portrait monitor and all the vertical MAME games are set to play properly in portrait mode by default.

It's just that I want emulation station to rotate without having to change the display-rotate=x line as that would hangs everything ELSE as well.

I'll let you know if I find anything that works.

Were you able to find a solution?

Here's my original thread:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7346/forcing-emulationstation-to-independently-rotate-orientation

Thanks!!

joeboese619

@killerq Heya sorry for the big delay. I never did find a good solution to this. I might start digging around again now that summer is here and I've got a bit more time on my hands.

edmaul69

@joeboese619 your table looks woody awesome. I would love to see the whole side of the cabinet including the control panel where the kid is standing.