Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

Weekly update! Had to do some unexpected errands this week, so there's only a small set of LaunchBox related updates:

LaunchBox: Added multiple files per game ("additional apps") support
LaunchBox: Improved video file detection

clamcho

@fluffypillow i am trying what you say it works but just open the emulator not start the game .

And i want to ask something , how can i start the pegasus after boot on android ? likes launcher . i have been searching and i just found auto boot on rasph berry if my eyes not wrong . i want to use it on my android tv box . thanks for your answer.

fluffypillow

@clamcho yeah then it seem ePSXe doesn't support opening external files :( As an alternative you could try a different emulator, eg. RetroArch, which does support launching with files.

how can i start the pegasus after boot on android ?

While it is technically possible, it's not enabled yet because I fear it's too easy to accidentally set it as the default launcher (especially on phones). It was asked by others as well, so I think I'll add some documentation first about how to reset it to the default, then add support for it.

clamcho

@fluffypillow as for now iam using retroarch for psx , as for each other platform iam using different kind emulator that more lightly than retroarch .

maybe they want it to be the default launcher on their android tv box machine than android phone likes me, in android tv box a bit little complicated to open app because you must use remote to navigate . i hope you can give the documentation how to make default app after boot likes a launcher without using third app because i find it delay if using third app . thanks for your support .

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I managed to get pegasus running on my pi4 using retropie's fkms_rpi4 branch and raspbian lite. Games loads to a black screen. ES works. I'm not a developer so I wouldn't know what to tell you to fix. I had to remove "!kms" from the script to get it to show up in retropie-setup.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior yeah I see that branch is quite active, I might need to do some updates as well. Pegasus seemed to work fine for me last week on Raspbian Lite (without RetroPie), but someone reported report of launching issues. Do you see something similar? Or you mean when you select a game, Pegasus closes but doesn't launch the game?

Darksavior

@fluffypillow
I am using a fully updated raspbian lite. No, it's nothing like what you linked. Pegasus boots fine. Launching a game loads to a black screen. It stays that way forever.
I forgot I could check the runcommand log. Here we go:

Executing: /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-snes9x/snes9x_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/snes/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes/7th Saga, The (USA).zip" --appendconfig /dev/shm/retroarch.cfg
failed to export dumb buffer: Permission denied
Failed to create scanout resource
failed to export dumb buffer: Permission denied
Failed to create scanout resource
/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh: line 1012:   748 Segmentation fault      /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-snes9x/snes9x_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/snes/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes/7th Saga, The (USA).zip" --appendconfig /dev/shm/retroarch.cfg

fluffypillow

@Darksavior hmm it seems as if RetroArch crashed, maybe it couldn't access the framebuffer for some reason? If you have some other emulators around, could you try whether the same happens for them too?

Darksavior

@fluffypillow It happens on all libretro and non-libretro emulators. So it looks like it might be related to the report you posted. I tried going to one of the options from the retropie tab I got a black screen again, ctrl+c and got this:
[e] Could not queue DRM page flips on screen HDMI1 (Device or resource busy)
Pi4 is on stable kernel 4.19.66-v71+

Side note, I also transferred all of my scraped art to pegasus. It's amazing. Very smooth. No lag. I can scroll fast and I don't see random game art loading while doing it.

fluffypillow

Weekly update! A large set of changes has just landed, so careful with the updating. Last week I've started working on improving the gamepad support, now the initial implementation is complete, and replaces the whole gamepad handling on many platforms. It's now based on SDL2, which is also used by eg. PPSSPP, some of the ports and other emulators. These changes should make many gamepads work out of the box and improve compatibility with others. However some platforms may have driver issues or quirks, so the new implementation should be tried with as many devices as possible. Feel free to open issues on GitHub of mention here if you run into troubles.

At the moment, these changes are available for Linux (desktop) and Raspberry Pi 0/1/2/3. I'm working on the Windows support at the moment, then will continue with porting to macOS and the Pi 4 (and also the video problems). These and Android use the same code as before.

BREAKING CHANGES

Linux: installing SDL2 is now required. If you're using any RetroPie version, it's very very likely to be already installed. For other devices, you can install it using eg. sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 (or libsdl2-dev if you prefer -dev packages). At least version 2.0.4 is required (which is what you have at least, unless you're still on Ubuntu 14/Debian Jessie).

For Windows/Mac, it will likely be built into Pegasus, so no steps would be necessary there.

KNOWN ISSUES

Remapping the accept button on the gamepad screen is troublesome. Checking older versions, I think it didn't work in the first place. Will fix it.

MAINTAINER INFORMATION

This section is for people who build or package Pegasus. There are a few new qmake options you can use to choose between the Qt (qtgamepad) and the SDL based backend, and to configure the build flags.

USE_SDL_GAMEPAD: if set, the SDL based backend will be in use
SDL_LIBS: a space-separated list of linker flags (-L, -l)
SDL_INCLUDES: a space-separated list of include directories, where one of them contains the file SDL.h

If only USE_SDL_GAMEPAD is set (ie. SDL_LIBS and SDL_INCLUDES are both empty), pkg-config will be used on platforms where it is available.

Example configuration (simple): qmake path/to/sources USE_SDL_GAMEPAD=1

Example configuration (complex):

qmake path/to/sources
  USE_SDL_GAMEPAD=1
  SDL_LIBS="-L/path/to/sdl/lib/ -lSDL2 -Wl,--no-undefined"
  SDL_INCLUDES=/path/to/sdl/include/SDL2/

Note that only the gamepad module is used from SDL, so if you're also building your own SDL, you can turn off many of its features during configuration. In most cases, it's also not necessary to link to SDLmain.

msheehan79

@fluffypillow I've started looking at implementing a couple of custom collection files but I seem to be a bit stuck with getting it to work - any chance you could take a look at the below and let me know what seems to be missing?

I've got several collections working for "Systems" i.e. all the roms in one folder. What I am trying to do now is to add a few custom collections that may span multiple directories. All of my metadata files are in the pegasus/config/metafiles directory and not in the rom folders.

What I have found is if I do not include the "extension" in the collection it doesn't find any files. The problem is if "extension" is included I end up pulling in ALL the games from each folder and not just the few specific games I want to include in a given collection. I'm not sure if I am missing a setting to have it just target the specific files and not everything in the folder.

Here is a simple example I was using to test, just trying pull in 2 games from each of the directories below:

collection: Custom Collection
shortname: custom
directory: ..\..\..\roms\virtualboy
directory: ..\..\..\roms\sgfx
files: ..\..\..\roms\sgfx\Dai-Makaimura (Japan).7z
files: ..\..\..\roms\sgfx\1941 - Counter Attack (Japan).7z
files: ..\..\..\roms\virtualboy\3-D Tetris (USA).7z
files: ..\..\..\roms\virtualboy\Galactic Pinball (Japan, USA).7z

And it finds no files, with the log below:

2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Program settings loaded
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Pegasus alpha12-81-geb4f8ff (2019-08-27)
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Running on Windows 10 (10.0) (x86_64, windows)
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `de`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `en`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `es`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `fr`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `hu`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `pt-BR`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found locale `ru`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Locale set to `en`
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Found theme 'Pegasus Grid' (`:/themes/pegasus-theme-grid/`)
2019-08-28T00:24:53 [i] Theme set to 'Pegasus Grid' (`:/themes/pegasus-theme-grid/`)
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [i] Metafiles: found `C:/Emulation/pegasus/config/metafiles/custom.metadata.txt`
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [i] Metafiles: finished game searching in 27ms
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [i] Steam: no installation found
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [i] Steam: finished game searching in 0ms
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [w] EmulationStation: system config file not found
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [i] EmulationStation: finished game searching in 0ms
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [w] No games found for collection 'Custom Collection', ignored
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [w] Game 'Galactic Pinball' does not belong to any collections, ignored
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [w] Game '3-D Tetris' does not belong to any collections, ignored
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [w] Game '1941: Counter Attack' does not belong to any collections, ignored
2019-08-28T00:24:54 [w] Game 'Ghouls'n Ghosts' does not belong to any collections, ignored

fluffypillow

@msheehan79 It was actually a bug, thanks for the report! Should be fixed now in the latest version.

fluffypillow

In other news, someone asked me (from outside the forum) if I could create a Discord server. Well I just made one, so if you're interested in that, here you go: discord.gg/KTtzP6y

msheehan79

@fluffypillow just downloaded the latest build and it works great now. Thanks!

msheehan79

@fluffypillow When you add additional custom metadata properties to a game or collection using the "x-" prefix, are these additional settings read into Pegasus?

My thought was to add some additional metadata info on the controller type used for specific games - I thought this would be a nice feature to note with with a simple icon showing if, for example, a game could be played with an SNES-style controller or if it needs the extra buttons/analog sticks of an XBox 360/PS4 style control etc.

However as I have been playing about with modifying the theme a little to see if I can read in this info I am not sure if these custom metadata properties would be available to the theme or if it only reads the standard ones.

fluffypillow

@msheehan79 coincidentally, I was also thinking about extending these extra properties :) Currently they are ignored, but I'd like to make them available for the themes, and perhaps also support using them in launch commands.

nemo93

Hello @fluffypillow
quick message just to let you know that the current "continuous builds" are broken for PI1/2/3 - and probably for X11 as well. There's no binary inside the zip archive. This has the side effect of removing Pegasus should you update via the Retropie Setup script.

Thanks!

fluffypillow

@nemo93 whoa, how did that even happen... will fix it in a minute.

EDIT: fixed, thanks!

msheehan79

@fluffypillow OK no worries, just wanted to confirm they aren't currently available. If you do incorporate this as a feature later on down the line, I will be sure to try it out!

fluffypillow

Weekly update! Had a busy week again, but managed to land a few updates:

The new gamepad handling is now in use on Windows too. Should work out of the box, no additional installation is necessary. Please report if you run into issues.
Fixed a bug where the files field in metadata files was not handled correctly (thanks @msheehan79)
Fixed the Linux release packaging (thanks @nemo93) and updated the .deb package
Fixed some incorrect log messages and other minor things