Announcing Pegasus Frontend

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Fixed some outdated and broken links in the documentation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!

AndersHP

This post is deleted!

Patientgamerfr

I'd like to thank you for the release of this front end. As a long time user of ES i'm grateful for your efforts and the compatbility with ES !
I have one question concerning themes : i would like to build my own and i couldnt find a way to start Pegasus with a "system page" which would include Pc, Snes, Mame etc... Is there a section in the documentation that i had overlooked ?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP it works quite differently than the default, so this will be a separate theme for now. In the future it'd be nice to improve the scalability of the whole UI as well.

@Patientgamerfr in Pegasus there are no predefined views, you have data (eg. game info and collections), and you can display it any way you want with as many views you'd like. I admit the theme documentation is not in good shape, hopefully I can update that too eventually.

fluffypillow

No major updates this week due to other projects and the holidays. I did some experimenting with a theme for small screens, and also fixed a filtering issue in the Secretary theme from a few weeks ago. For the next week I'll see if I can do some more documentation updates, including the theme section.

aatheronb

thx for the search bar guys
i sorta need it with 4000 games to look through

clamcho

@fluffypillow sorry sir i want to report that may tv box didn't detect pegasus as an launcher . my tv box spec is Amlogic S905X, quad core ARM Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5 GHz with penta-core Mali-450MP GPU @ 750 MHz

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fluffypillow

@clamcho Hi, this feature is available in the latest releases of Pegasus, have you tried that?