Announcing Pegasus Frontend

[jerzeeloon]

@fluffypillow not entirely sure as shield is the 1st and only Android TV device I've owned as it's become a scarce market aside from tvs with Android TV built in with TV os market being saturated by apple, Roku and ironically Amazon's Android based offering it seems stock Android TV is endangered. The one benefit of the shield is they've maintained steady firmware updates since the original 2015 release and emulation has benifited from good driver support on Nvidia's part. Unfortunately the actual natively supported app offerings are dismal in opposition to say a Android tablet or phone the native appstore on shield only offers a small mixture streaming apps and games that are outdated and Nvidia's native game store offerings are also pretty dismal a few ports of older PC game ports that are overpriced in comparison to the PC version and a andoid game library that seems to fluctuate what apps are Android TV compatible. There's litteraly games I've bought that dissapeared from the marketplace and now have to be side loaded and others that appear in the market but when you click on it there's no option to install it and even web browser play store will say it's not compatible with the shield? Anyway getting off track. What I like about shield is the ability to play my steam/Ubisoft PC library in better then console fidelity for a lower price and at least for now no subscription cost. And secondly it's emulation capabilities which imo far exeed the capability of a standard rasberry pi and even out paces newer more powerful/expensive sbc's like odroid where we lack is the plethora of themes and customization offered by pie devices like attract mode and emulation station and recal box. The only decent frontend I've found is Arcbrowser but it lacks video snap support and requires all custom artwork be in the same folder as the ROMs with the same name and different suffixes which gets tedious and unorganized imo. Other frontends haven't appealed to me and yours is like a ray of hope that I'll finally have a frontend that utilizes high quality scraped assets, has theme support and pretty much offers everything I've wanted in frontend and I retain the the emulation prowess shield provides I almost in a way downgraded to a retropie device for the sake of support even though I've heard it struggles to run certain games in opposition to shield. Sorry I just wrote a book just very enthusiastic about this project. I love your grid theme and really like @PlayingKarrde Gameos theme and can't wait to see how this thing develops. In the past there were alot of avenues to get side loaded apps recognized by shield as if it was native unfortunately the Oreo update broke alot of apps like apk2tv, TV apps repo and others. Sideload launcher still works but you have to go into it as opposed to having a shortcut to said sideloaded app on home screen and some apps don't play nicely. Yours works for the most part just doesn't return me to your frontend when I exit a emulated game which is a bummer and as I said it doesn't recognize my external hard drive where I primarily keep my ROM collection but I do have 100gb adopted storage flash drive I've moved some of my favorite systems too for the sake of using this great frontend. I thought maybe it was cause my removable storage was NTFS but seeing as you also support windows I assume That's not the case. I don't know if it interests you to try and natively support Android TV or the Shield derivative in this case but maybe you could touch base with other devs like the people who make dig or Arc browser totally your call and I can't be mad either way I'm just glad you supported Android in the 1st place as we usually get overlooked while Linux, pi and windows get all the love. I wish I was dev savvy and had answers but I'm just a Beneficiary who enjoys retrogaming. Anyway cheers and thank you. I look forward to the future of Pegasus regardless of whether you pledge support to shield as I'm sure you have a lot on your plate as is with multi platform support and the constant improvements your doing. Again sorry for the book. End of rant.

[msheehan79]

@fluffypillow Ok no worries! Just glad you could replicate the issue your end so I know it's not just some goofy issue with my specific setup. I'll keep an eye on your git updates and can retest once you do have time to implement a fix.

Thanks for looking into this!

[PlayingKarrde]

@jerzeeloon do you mind sharing your settings for the shield?

Also, plus one here for proper Shield support. It really is an amazing emulator machine. I test all my changes for my theme on it but haven't spent any time getting the actual launching of games going. It's definitely a pain launching it from the sideload launcher too (I haven't even figured out how to get a shortcut on the home screen yet haha).

If quitting games goes back to the home screen rather than the launcher that kind sucks though :( I was considering moving my main emulation platform over to it but may have to stick with PC if that's the case.

[jerzeeloon]

@PlayingKarrde I hear you my current scenario is that I have a potato laptop and shield is my only avenue for retro gaming for the moment, until I can save up to build a gaming PC. This frontend suits my needs but I would like to find a way to return to frontend on emulator exit and use external storage rom paths. Cheers to you for the great theme it's what I'm currently using. My current setup is quick and dirty as I just copied a few systems over from my external for testing and I'm actually using paid for standalone .emu apps for launching snes, Genesis and the free MupenFZ from the play store for N64 cause it was less parameters then retroarch but I plan on trying retroarch launching soon. Anyways here's the settings I'm currently using

collection: snes
extension: sfc,smc
launch: am start --user 0 -a android.intent.action.VIEW -n
com.explusalpha.Snes9xPlus/com.imagine.BaseActivity
-d "file://{file.path}"

collection: N64
extension: v64,z64,n64
launch: am start --user 0 -a android.intent.action.VIEW -n org.mupen64plusae.v3.fzurita/paulscode.android.mupen64plusae.SplashActivity -d "file://{file.path}"

collection: Genesis
extension: gen,md
launch: am start --user 0 -a android.intent.action.VIEW -n com.explusalpha.MdEmu/com.imagine.BaseActivity -d "file://{file.path}"

[fluffypillow]

Weekly update!

• In progress
  • Initial implementation of the metadata changes is done, I'll write tests and finish what's left the next week (or two)
• Android TV improvements
  • Pegasus is now a proper TV app and should no longer require sideloading (however it wasn't tested on actual hardware, so feel free to report if something doesn't work)
  • Added higher resolution launch icons for devices with huge screen resolutions

[jerzeeloon]

@fluffypillow Thank you so much for adding proper Android TV support. This is already imo the best frontend on Android and the fact that it's still considered alpha and your dedication to continuous improvement is relentless. I can only fathom how great it will be in the future. Thank you.

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow I'm having another go at updating my theme but due to the scale I'm still struggling a bit. I'm just wondering, now that there's no concept of a current collection or current game you're doing the sorting and getting of those manually. I'm just wondering how you're handling that. Are you doing it all at the theme.qml level and sending those IDs down to each of your subsequent pages? Handling all game and collection management at the top level then? I mean that seems like the most efficient way but I just want to make sure before I go too far down that rabbit hole. I only have short bursts of time to spend on the theme these days so I'm not able to commit enough of a chunk of time to figure it out completely on my own.

-edit- no matter. I went ahead with this method anyway and I've gotten it all updated. Now I can look into implementing some of these new features I was badgering you about haha

I did notice that it isn't pulling the year from the metadata. Is this part of your current updates?

[fluffypillow]

@PlayingKarrde actually at the moment none of my themes use custom sorting, they just use the default by-name order (yeah, I should really fix the filter panel in the default theme). Unlike graphical things though, sorting shouldn't be a performance bottleneck, so you can use it wherever you'd like to, eg. in the same file where you'd display a list of games is fine too.
In practice when you have a model of which you want to have a sorted or filtered version, eg. api.allGames, instead of using it directly you'd create a SortFilterProxyModel, set the api.allGames as its input, and use this new object as the model of say, ListView. Here's a short example for using SortFilterProxyModel here: http://pegasus-frontend.org/docs/themes/api/#sorting-and-filtering, and you can find the theme update commits around the bottom part of this comment.

As for the current selection, in my themes the collections and games are often managed in different files (eg. a system selector bar), so yes, in these case I had to route the collection (or its index) from one file to another. To do this, you can use the fact that propertyes of an item are accessible in its parent, and so can be set up as parameters for other objects.
In the ES2 theme for example, the Collection screen has a currentCollection property that is updated when the collection changes. This property is accessible in its parent, ie. theme.qml, where then it is set (bound) as the value of the Details screen's similarly named property, here. So whenever the collection changes on the Collection screen, the Details screen's property is updated accordingly.
For the reverse direction (changing the collection from the Details screen), I emit signals where I ask the Collection screen to select the next/prev collection. These are also handled in theme.qml, cause the Collection screen to change the current collection property, and in turn update the Details screen too. This also keeps the two screens in sync.

Now this is just one way to do it, managing top-level index properties in theme.qml is also certainly a possibility (and I think I've used it in one of the themes). You can do whichever fits your use case or theme structure better.

I did notice that it isn't pulling the year from the metadata

Hm could you explain that a bit? Does it fails to read the release date from the metadata files?

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow Yep I handled all my collection and game selection handling at the theme.qml level and either passed them down through bindings or used signals coming up to affect them. To be honest I think this way is actually a lot cleaner as now there's only one place I need to worry about controlling this information, although I've definitely had to get creative with naming haha.

I actually haven't looked into sorting too much yet but will likely take a look at this today. It definitely seems very powerful. Would you liken it to doing a SQL request? If so there are definitely some cool things I'd like to try.

Hm could you explain that a bit? Does it fails to read the release date from the metadata files?

Year, month and day don't seem to pull anything back when called. I just get an undefined value. Release works so I guess I could just format that, but just wanted to let you know.

[fluffypillow]

@PlayingKarrde

Would you liken it to doing a SQL request?

In terms of sorting and filtering a selection, yes, kind of like that. Nothing to JOIN though :)

Year, month and day don't seem to pull anything back when called.

Ah yes, they got renamed to releaseYear, etc. a few releases ago, then forgot to update the docs. But considering that these can be queried with simple JS calls too, it might be better to just remove them altogether.

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow Ah perfect I'll just use the JS call instead thanks.

BTW, do you happen to know how to get a gridview to automatically scroll to the correct index if it's loading from memory? The correct item is selected but the view won't switch to it unless I change the index first.

[fluffypillow]

@PlayingKarrde I think it should scroll there if the index is changed after the view is initialized, ie. in Component.onCompleted or later, like here. If that doesn't seem to work, you can also scroll there manually with positionViewAtIndex.

[fluffypillow]

Weekly update: the metadata changes are now complete and tested, now I'm in the middle of updating the third-party data sources and cleaning things up. This shouldn't take long. What's left is updating the documentation and adding a way to convert to the new format from the old files. This one may take a bit of time. After all these are done, the changes can finally land so you can expect a megapost in one of these weeks.

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow I'm trying to implement the sorting but getting this error when importing the SortFilterProxyModel.

module "SortFilterProxyModel" is not installed

[fluffypillow]

@PlayingKarrde should be fixed now, thanks!

[PlayingKarrde]

@fluffypillow Thanks.

Also I'll move future discussion to the theme thread instead since I realise I've been clogging up this one with all these questions that would only be applicable to theme makers... Whoops sorry!

[fluffypillow]

Phew, all right, the metadata changes are finally here! There are still a few missing things, but the file format part is done and the rest will come as follow-up patches. This is a breaking change, so feel free to remain on an older version if you don't want to mess with the update right now. The previous-latest version (up until yesterday) for all platforms is also still available here.

Here's what changed:

• The format of collections.txt and metadata.txt is now united
  • You can now define both collections and games in the same file and only one of them is enough to be present in a directory.
  • Pegasus will try to open collections.pegasus.txt, metadata.pegasus.txt, collections.txt and metadata.txt(in this order) and stops at the first file it founds. (I've put collections first so at least your collections will be found after the update. I'll move metadata first in the next, more stable release.)
• Metadata file format changes
  • Haven't finished the documentation yet, but a draft is available here.
  • Games can now consist of more than one file, and as such game entries are defined by their title (game:), and not a filename.
  • A cleaner difference between text values and lists
  • Empty lines now have to be marked with a single dot. This makes the multiline texts, like long descriptions continuous, avoiding the "text flying in the middle of nowhere" kind of effect. It also makes the format closer to the Debian config format (on which it is based on in the first place).
• Updated the format converter tool
  • It's available here
  • You can now convert between the old ("alpha 10") and the new format
  • Fixed some minor bugs as well

Here's what's still missing:

• Documentation
• Actual launching support for games with multiple files
• Custom names and properties for the individual files
• Theme support for accessing the launchable entries

Now these changes involved changing quite a large part of the internal code; I've tried to test most of the things, but there might be still bugs lurking around (including the converter page). Testing would be much appreciated!

Developers: the commit before this change is 9f38c2b.

[Darksavior]

@fluffypillow I noticed builds are still meant for the pi2. Will building specifically for the pi3 offer any performance benefits?

[fluffypillow]

@Darksavior actually it may! In addition an update to Qt also comes out next month, which might bring some performance improvements, so I do plan to do some experimenting with additional build targets then.

[PlayingKarrde]

I know this is a huge task so really just curious about this right now, but do you have any plans to integrate adding/modifying etc collections or roms into Pegasus itself at some point?

It's still alpha I know but I have to assume that ease of adding systems and roms would be one of the huge main wants from the majority of users. Needing extensive documentation for creating game lists surely isn't sustainable long term so just wondering what your thoughts are on this.