Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

No major updates this week, as I was busy with some internal restructuring. There was a bug in the path handling of the Skraper support, as discussed above, this is now fixed.

PlayingKarrde

I realise this is likely not a Pegasus issue but I'm curious if anyone else has had this problem? I'm trying to run at 4k hdr but I get crazy flickering when running the frontend. I noticed it also with EmulationStation as well as the retroarch overlays if I use gl as the renderer (it's fine in vulcan). Could this be related to the renderer Pegasus (and ES) uses? I've managed to rule out bandwidth issues with my cable which is what I originally suspected it was.

-edit-
Nevermind it WAS a bandwidth issue haha. For anyone else wanting to display in 4k hdr, make sure you go into your Nvidia control panel and set the color mode to yCbCr422 and the color depth of 10 bpc. If you have an HDMI 2.0a card you won't need to worry though.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde - Great job on the theme! From what I've read on here, it seems like maybe this will change soon, but I'm having trouble getting all the functionality out of your theme. I'm still a noobie when it comes to Linux and QML both, so if you wouldn't mind pointing me in the right direction, I would appreciate it!

Am I able to run your theme effectively from a gameslist.xml file?

Here is what I've tried:

	<game>
		<path>./Dragon Force (USA).cue</path>
		<name>Dragon Force</name>
		<image>./media/images/Dragon Force (USA).png</image>
		<boxart>./media/boxart/Dragon Force (USA).png</boxart>
		<wheel>./media/wheel/Dragon Force (USA).png</wheel>
		<logo>./media/wheel/Dragon Force (USA).png</logo>
		<video>./media/videos/Dragon Force (USA).mp4</video>
	</game>

Vidoes and mix files (as image) both work where I would like them to. The logo/wheel art, however, does not. Any help would be much appreciated! Maybe I should just wait until the update, but I'm trying to figure it out! :) Thanks!

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre I'm not too sure about gamelist files as I convert mine to metadata.txt files. I'm not 100% sure how Pegasus converts the information into it's own data. If you're using skraper and have the latest update though, you shouldn't need to include the media urls in your gamelist.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@hooperre I'm not too sure about gamelist files as I convert mine to metadata.txt files. I'm not 100% sure how Pegasus converts the information into it's own data. If you're using skraper and have the latest update though, you shouldn't need to include the media urls in your gamelist.

Thanks. I was getting a gamelist.srm file, but I'm not getting one generated anymore after messing with settings. I think it probably has something to do with why my pictures aren't popping up. I "re-installed" the latest Skraper and am still having that issue.

Do you have a gameslist.srm file in your folder contents?

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre No I don't. Are you telling it to scrape for emulationstation gamelist.xml? The xml that mine creates that i convert looks like this:

<game source="ScreenScraper.fr" id="13677">
<path>./Bomberman Online (USA).chd</path>
<name>Bomberman Online</name>
<desc>snip</desc>
<rating>0.7</rating>
<releasedate>20011030T000000</releasedate>
<developer>Sega</developer>
<publisher>Hudson</publisher>
<genre>Action</genre>
<players>4+</players>
<hash>00000000</hash>
</game>

The resulting metadata.txt would be:

file: Bomberman Online (USA).chd
title: Bomberman Online
developer: Sega
genre: Action
release: 2001-10-30
players: 4
description: snip
rating: 70%
x-id: 13677
x-source: ScreenScraper.fr

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde Thanks for the response.

Well, shoot. My gameslist.xml file and location of my image files looks like this:

    <image>./media/images/Dragon Force (USA).png</image>
    <boxFront>./media/boxFront/Dragon Force (USA).png</boxFront>
    <logo>./media/logo/Dragon Force (USA).png</logo>
    <video>./media/videos/Dragon Force (USA).mp4</video>

And my metadata.xml file is:

file: Dragon Force (USA).cue
title: Dragon Force
developer: SOJ
genre: Strategy
release: 1996-11-30
players: 1
description: Stuff
x-id: 13088
x-source: ScreenScraper.fr

No luck on getting a wheel/logo image, though. :( I see that with the 11/25 commit the file organizer.exe file was removed. Is this still necessary?

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre If you have the latest Pegasus (like from a couple of days ago) then it isn't necessary, that's why I removed it. Have you gone into data sources and made sure Use Skraper Assets has been checked? Your metadata.txt looks fine.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde Solved now :) It was checked, but because I only had 1 game in there, I didn't have a collections.txt file, which is why it didn't work. Oops... Thanks for helping me figure it out!

So that's kind of interesting that only the logo/wheel/marquee doesn't work with given Emulationstation default images. When I have both Skraper Assets AND Emulationstation checked, it results in using my mix images (located in media/images folder) instead of box art, video works, and logos work. If only Skraper Assets is checked, it works exactly how yours is presented in the video. Kinda neat. Just so you are aware :).

Anyway, love the theme and love Pegasus. Thanks to both @PlayingKarrde and @fluffypillow for your work! You're taking my Pi from looking like a hacky machine to a big company released retro-gaming console! :)

herb_fargus

Post 1000. Just cause I can.

Keep up the good work.

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre Oh very interesting. I wonder why that is. I guess the emulationstation data is given higher priority but somehow also the same tag. It should only be looking for boxart images there. Weird. How does it look?

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde The whole thing all around looks amazing. Sorry I don't have a better method of getting a picture for you.

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre thanks. Well at least it doesn't break. Would still like to know why it's doing this so I could include the option for people to choose at some point though.

fluffypillow

Over 1000 post, yay!

@hooperre @PlayingKarrde for gamelist.xml Pegasus supports the tags that are officially available and documented in EmulationStation (including the RetroPie master branch). At the moment, these are image, marquee and video, where image is assumed to be the box front art (boxFront in themes), but in practice you can set it to anything.

During loading, ES2 support happens to have a higher priority than Skraper, so if a game already has a box front art set (eg. by image), it won't get overwritten. As a workaround, I guess you could rename the image tags to something else while you're using Pegasus, then name them back when using ES2 (either manually or by a script). With this you can get the metadata from the gamelists, and the assets from Skraper.

PlayingKarrde

Am I correct in assuming that if you have mix images you've already made the decision to view those in ES in place of boxart anyway? I know if won't automatically scrape for those. If that's the case it's fine, the user is already making that choice and I don't need to do anything.

@fluffypillow I have a quick question: do we have any way of gaining access through the api to the button configs? I want to add some button help but since users are able to customise their buttons I will need to change the art based on their selection. If it's not possible yet I can add it as a feature request on github. Also, I think you mentioned this as something you're working on but just to be sure, will we be able to get models independent of the collection as a whole? For example can I get a list of most recently played games regardless of collection they belong to? Or a list of all favourites, again collection independent?

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde

gaining access through the api to the button configs

Actually there's support for that already. For example, to get the keys registered as "accept", you could use api.keys.accept. It returns an array of objects, each of them having a key and a modifier field, which can be used the same way as in QML KeyEvents. I'll also add a proper toString() function to them real quick, then you could pretty print them too.

will we be able to get models independent of the collection as a whole?

Yes, the whole list of all games will be available separately too, and all lists will be filterable individually.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow Amazing thanks!

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde Well turns out the returned arrays have some issues at the moment... will fix it tomorrow.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow No worries, I can wait. Thanks.

fluffypillow

Took more than just a few lines, but at least the key arrays work now. toString happened to be taken already, so instead you can use name() to get a readable name of the keys.