Announcing Pegasus Frontend

[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?

[fluffypillow]

@PlayingKarrde That's certainly interesting, as according to the source code of MAME, both slashes are accepted. But other than that, yes, using backslashes on Windows sounds like a good idea.

[fluffypillow]

Okay, after quite some time one of the largest weekly updates has landed! This is yet another breaking change, so feel free to keep an older version around if any of these changes affect you negatively.

• Major changes in the theme Api
  • It is now possible to present games and collections in multiple locations with custom ordering and filtering
  • It is now possible to present a list of all existing games, and similarly, sort or filter it with custom parameters
  • See below for implementation details
• Updated the 9999999 and ES2 Simple themes to these themeing changes (I should really make an updater eventually)
• Bugfixes and optimizations
  • Fixed a bug where Pegasus crashed on exit
  • Fixed a bug where log files weren't saved properly before reboot/shutdown
  • Fixed a bug where the ES2 support could cause a crash during loading

The bad news:

• Custom filters support and searching/filtering in the default theme is temporarily disabled (haven't finished updating that part yet)
• At the moment, Pegasus doesn't remember the selected game and its position in the menu when you return from playing. This will be fixed in the future, likely when theme options get added.

Theme Api changes:

• Previously, collection list objects and game list objects had index, current, increment/decrementIndex() fields and methods (eg. api.collections.current). Because the lists can now appear in multiple places with different sorting and filtering, having one index isn't particularly meaningful anymore, and thus all these fields and methods were removed.
• Because the only remaining field would have been model (eg. api.collections.model), the whole intermediate object got removed, and the object itself can now be used as model (eg. api.collections).
• These models are no longer JavaScript arrays, but so called "item models". They can be used without any difference in List/Grid/PathViews' model property. As for manual operations,
  • to get a single item, instead of themodel[anindex], you'd use themodel.get(anindex)
  • to get the count of items, instead of themodel.length, you'd use themodel.count
• In addition, the list of all games is now accessible as api.allGames, which is a list of game objects similarly to a single collection's games field.
• With these changes, the current data structure is:
  • api.collections is a list of collections, which is an item model
  • each collection has the same fields as before (see the Api docs)
  • each collection has a games field, a list of games, which is an item model
  • each game has the same fields and launch() method as before
  • api.allGames is a list of all games, independent of collections. Also an item model.
• For inspriation with updating theme code, you can take a look at the different ways it's handled in the commits of ES2 Simple and 9999999-in-1. The main theme is a mess, but if you wish, you can take a look at these commits too.

Sorting and filtering:

• SortFilterProxyModel is now available. Take a look at the example there to see how it's used. You can find the list of sorters/filters here.
• For example, to get the list of all games ordered by play time, you could write something like

import SortFilterProxyModel 0.2

...

SortFilterProxyModel {
    id: mysorter
    sourceModel: api.allGames
    sorters: RoleSorter { roleName: "playTime" }
}

ListView {
    model: mysorter
    ...
}

• Because filtering can now be done in themes, api.filters is now removed. In the future, it might be updated to hold the user-defined custom filters instead.

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow amazing thanks for this. Been excited about these changes coming. I'll try and update my theme tomorrow if I have time.

[fluffypillow]

PS. Also fixed the slashing issue, {file.path} and {file.dir} now uses backslashes as directory separator on Windows

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

PS. Also fixed the slashing issue, {file.path} and {file.dir} now uses backslashes as directory separator on Windows

<3

[fluffypillow]

No major updates this week yet, only a few memory optimizations. I've started the work on the metadata changes however, but will likely get finished in the next year. Until then, happy holidays!

[5schatten]

@fluffypillow I'm using your frontend in my LE fork https://github.com/5schatten/LibreELEC.tv/tree/libreelec-9.0-rr/packages/5schatten/emulation-frontends/pegasus-frontend and I start it with this script https://github.com/5schatten/LibreELEC.tv/blob/libreelec-9.0-rr/packages/5schatten/emulation-frontends/pegasus-frontend/scripts/pegasus-fe-Generic.start

Once I've exit a game the frontend resets to the first system. So e.g. I play NES games and everytime it resets to GB. Is it supposed to be this way? Emulationstation for example keeps the last used system once you exit an emulator so for example a lr-core, Dolphin or else. Maybe it's a problem of the theme itself? I'm not sure if this happened with the gameOS theme too but I can't test it untill the dev adopted your latest API changes.

[fluffypillow]

@5schatten Yes, remembering the launched game is temporarily removed due to the changes in the theme API (see here), but will be re-added soon. If it's urgent, you can try using the stable release until then, or build commit 3ab18e0, which is right before this whole patch set.

[5schatten]

@fluffypillow thx for the explanation :-) otherwise it's a great frontend once you've polished the minor issues ;-) Btw. I've opened a new "issue" though it's more a feature request. Can you skip the mame/fba bios files like recent ES versions do?

[fluffypillow]

@5schatten Ah sorry, missed the mail about a new issue somehow. Will take a look.

[jerzeeloon]

Can anyone confirm successfully launching a game from Nvidia shield TV and if so please post a the exact parameters used including exactly what they entered for "file://{file.path}" for said console so I can conclude what i should enter for those parameters as I love the look and feel of this ui it's everything I've wanted in a frontend unfortunately throughout the last month of tinkering I'm yet to have successfully launched a game. I have all collections and assets showing in menu but when I try to launch a game it just send me back to my devices home screen.

[wallmachine]

Will this eventually support ultimarc servostiks and LEDBlinky?
Also how will you advise the updates to the theme section? I don't want to get into it and many things have changed.