Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@Darksavior yes, the images are reduced to 256x256, which might be indeed a bit small on 4K :)

The atomic mode setting should be turned on, it allows to use a more modern way to handle the video driver, according to the docs, which the Pi 4 happens to support. Don't worry about the warning, apparently there's a way to provide some framebuffer settings to override, and the warning is produced when it's not set (ie. invalid).

Darksavior

Thanks, guys.

@fluffypillow So how do I automate that command? I tried to go into retropie-setup's autostart settings and add export QT_QPA_EGLFS_KMS_ATOMIC=1 before pegasus-fe but that doesn't work. If that command will be integrated into pegasus, then I can wait, no big deal. My main concern was games loading and now I can finally stop using ES again.

Also, I'm testing the scaling, 512 seems to still be smooth and not a blurry mess. Too bad I can't adjust scaling based on system. Overall, I'm getting a lot of box art loading while scrolling. This pi4 has 2GB of ram. Is there a way to adjust ram usage in pegasus? Or do I give the gpu more ram? In the meantime I have lowered the res of some of those systems close to the scaling res which minimizes the loading.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior on RetroPie /usr/bin/pegasus-fe is a script, where such exports can be added (there's already a color space related one).

Image loading depends on the GPU memory (the larger it is the more images it can hold) while the actual speed of loading depends on the file system reading speed and how fast the CPU and the RAM is.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Fair Enough. The keyboard also stops working completely if you load a game, exit the game, and exit pegasus. Pegasus also crashed when disconnecting my ps4 pad.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior made a new build, after returning from a game the keyboard should now work fine, and maybe it also fixes the controller problems. It seems the keys still don't work after closing Pegasus though.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Yep, kb fine (in pegasus), pad disconnects fine.

I tried to increase the gpu memory, but my pi complained and refused to load. I'll keep it on 500...

spartan

@fluffypillow is the new gamepad implementation ready for Android? I'd love be able to map my control within pegasus-frontend

fluffypillow

@spartan on Android, Android's own gamepad support is used, which seems to work as expected according to my tests, but if you can try other devices or have troubles feel free to comment at the issue.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior another build! The terminal should work fine now after leaving Pegasus.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow
Just tested Pegasus on my Gameboy build with a 320x240 screen, and I really like the the way how Pegasus looks and works with box art, except that the text is unreadable, both in settings and game descriptions.

I uploaded a photo on github and opened an issue, as well as donated on Paypal. Sorry I didn't do this before, your work is greatly appreciated!

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Thank you! Yea, the default theme originally wasn't made with 240p screens in mind. Looking at the image, it seems there would be a need for several functional changes to make it easy to use, so I'm thinking maybe a small-screen edition might fit this case better. It'd be also interesting to design a theme that'd fit all kinds of screens.

fluffypillow

Also a weekly update! (or rather, a recap of the last two)

After some more work (and code hacking), Pegasus is finally functional on the Pi 4. I've also updated the RetroPie script, it should be available on both the master and the fkms branch.
On Linux, Pegasus is now available in Flatpak format from FlatHub.

With that, this release is now marked as Alpha 13. I've also updated the list of weekly changelogs in the opening post.

Now I should really update the documentation.

SinisterSpatula

Disregard, posted in error, and can't delete.

clamcho

excuse me sir i want to ask about pegasus become a default launcher on android, so after booting pegasus will be default launcher . it's possible for now ? if not can i know the keyword search on google to make an app become a launcher? just now i can't find the right keyword .

fluffypillow

@clamcho this is now possible with today's build, and documented here: https://pegasus-frontend.org/docs/user-guide/platform-android/#default-launcher

Just a few notes:

Pegasus wasn't primarily made to be an Android launcher, so it's possible that things might not work as expected. Feel free to report bugs!
To restore the original Launcher, follow the documentation or eg. this article.
DO NOT quit from Pegasus using the menu :) I'll remove those buttons in the future.

hooperre

Lovely on my Pi 4! :)

fluffypillow

Weekly update!

Added experimental support for several Odroid boards:
- Odroid C0/C1/C1+
- Odroid C2
- Odroid XU3/XU3-Lite/XU4
- They can be downloaded from https://pegasus-frontend.org. These releases are untested and highly experimental, to the level that they may or may not even work. They require mali-fbdev.
Linux: Added experimental Lutris support. Should work out of the box, but wasn't very well tested yet.
Android: It is now possible to set Pegasus as a launcher (see a few comments earlier)
Steam: Proton builds (released so far) no longer show up among the games
LaunchBox: Improved detection of platforms and games
LaunchBox: Improved automatic video file detection and added support for manually set video and music files
Metadata Editor: Fixed a bug where the clipboard didn't work on certain platforms
Improved the default theme to work better with game images other than the box front
Updated the documentation, especially the Android RetroArch section, the build instructions and some of the platform notes
Fixed some outdated and broken links in the documentation
Very minor logging improvements

SudoShadow

@fluffypillow I just created an account to say I love this theme and appreciate the work you are putting into this :)

MeduZaPaT

Nice work!!

fluffypillow

Weekly update!

Added internal support for game tags: These could be used for eg. marking games that support controllers, have co-op game modes, have been completed, etc.
- In metadata files, a new tags field can be used for this one tag per line
- Tags are also collected for Steam games automatically
Added support for game sort titles: This can be used for cases when the game should be sorted differently than by the title, eg. when it contains roman numerals or special characters
Created a new theme for experimenting with sorting and filtering. Probably not the best looking one for general use, but might be useful as an example for theme creators.

Improved the loading speed of metadata files when collections only have fileentries
Made some small updates on a few documentation pages. The new features above are also documented (see: metadata file page and theme Api reference).
Minor internal configuration improvements and build optimizations
Maintainers: Removed the INSTALL_DATADIR configuration option. It wasn't really used since Pegasus is a single executable, and for config files there are plenty of directories supported already.
Maintainers: Added support for installing the readme and license files, by specifying the INSTALL_DOCDIR configuration option. For a global installation on Linux, the XDG spec recommends setting it to /usr/share/doc/pegasus-frontend.
Theme makers: globalFonts is now also accessible as global.fonts. The plan is to have all globally accessible things to reside inside global, so globalFontsand vpx() may get deprecated/removed in the (far) future.
Theme makers: toVarArray() is now documented.