Announcing Pegasus Frontend

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.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP I've also experimented with creating a theme for 240x screens, but I wasn't managed to make one I'd be pleased with.

If we think in a grid, we'd probably need to pick a fixed cell size to avoid the scaling issue the default theme has when there are mixed size assets. It looks like two landscape- or three portrait images would fit comfortably in this size. With using landscape tiles, we'd get the gpiOS theme. With portrait, we run into the issue that most platforms seem to have horizontal images by default, so cropping them vertically is kind of ugly. So now I'm thinking about a single-list kind of layout, but then that's kind of different than the default one.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow
Thanks for your work!
I don't know if I'm understanding you right.. I actually think the original theme looks great, and handles the different orientations (landscape/portrait) really well..

The only issue on a small screen is the coversizes are way too small.
Will upping the size result in artifacts?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Well there's an old issue about mixed portrait/landscape box arts looking ugly, so to avoid that I was thinking about making the new theme have a fixed column count. What seemed to fit comfortably was either 2 columns of landscape images or 3 columns of portrait images. It can be made to work like the default theme and support both, but then it will also be sensitive to mixed images.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow Ah, but that issue will only be present with libraries with both landscape and portraits, right? I think in this case one could crop either one of them, but in 99% of the cases, it's either portrait or landscape, and this functions perfectly in Pegasus :)

Edit:
@fluffypillow
Good that the old issue is closed now.
Your new take on this looks great on Github. Are you thinking a theme or a toggle, that simultaneously alters the text in Pegasus?

Either way, great great work!