Announcing Pegasus Frontend

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.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow perfect thanks a ton. I'll probably try and implement it over the next couple of days. In a perfect world I'd love to somehow be able to get an id of the controller registered so I can show the appropriate art (xbox/ps4/keyboard) but I think that's way out of the scope of what's needed right now so everyone will have to suck it up and use xbox art haha.

When theme settings come in I'll add the option to turn off button help too.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde not every controller has a proper name, but even when they do they might not be particularly useful. Can you guess what assets to show for "ChingWang 2000" or something like "Generic"? :)

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow oh yes I know, I didn't plan on doing it for every one. Just xbox, PS4 and keyboard. If it isn't one of those it would just default to Xbox.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde Just an idea. Maybe create a GameOS Theme thread within the forums so I'm not spamming the Pegasus thread?

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre Good idea. I've created a thread here.

fluffypillow

Weekly update: the next set of the planned theme changes is mostly complete, collections and games can now appear multiple times and there's also a list of all games. However custom sorting/filtering and a few important bits are still missing, so there's no actual release this time. Should't take that long now though, so a new update might come before the next weekend.

sam85461

@fluffypillow Hey, I'm very interested in your frontend, it looks great so far. Quick question, you support game list files from emulationstation, does that mean you have no plans of adding a scraper? Would this mean users have to either manually add them (meta data and artwork) or scrape them in emulationstation first? I'm on windows and havent used emulationstation to scrape my collection.

fluffypillow

@sam85461 Yes, Pegasus can read EmulationStation's files, but you can use any other standalone scraper (SSelph's, Skyscraper, Skraper, Universal XML, etc.) to generate them and download assets. There's no built-in scraper in Pegasus at the moment, but might come in the future.

sam85461

@fluffypillow Awesome thanks for the info. Just one more question, Its kind of off-topic to retropie/Linux/android but for windows, do you know how rocketlauncher would be setup with your frontend. I have my collection setup through rocketlauncher because I used to use hyperspin. Rocketlauncher launches the roms. Thanks for your hard work!

PlayingKarrde

@sam85461 said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@fluffypillow Awesome thanks for the info. Just one more question, Its kind of off-topic to retropie/Linux/android but for windows, do you know how rocketlauncher would be setup with your frontend. I have my collection setup through rocketlauncher because I used to use hyperspin. Rocketlauncher launches the roms. Thanks for your hard work!

I haven't tried using scripts yet but they might be what you're looking for.

fluffypillow

@sam85461 never used RocketLauncher or HyperSpin personally, so not sure if I can help with that. According to their wiki you're supposed to edit the launch commands of your systems/collections (es_systems.cfg for EmulationStation). Something like this, except use %ROM% instead of [name], I think?

fluffypillow

Weekly update! The themeing changes are functionally complete, I've just run into some last minute issues which take some time. As soon are they are fixed, the update is ready.

Other than that, this week Brazilian Portuguese language was added (thanks @rutantan). Interestingly, depending on the system it might appear simply as "português" in the menu (instead of eg. "português do Brasil"). Not sure how much of an issue is that, or if that's actually what's expected. Not a bug in Pegasus itself, but I can add a workaround if it turns out to be confusing.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow I'm experiencing a strange problem loading arcade roms (both FBA and MAME) on one PC (but not another). It stems from the launcher using forward slashes in {file.path} rather than backslashes which Windows typically uses for directory paths. If I manually change the argument to be all backslashes then it will work from the command line, but that doesn't really help me with Pegasus.

What's most strange is that it works fine on my primary PC. Either way it might make sense to change this for the windows build so it uses backslashes instead?