Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@tekn0 You mean the loading screen? I think that's fine, it might take some time on certain systems so with it you still see something happening on the screen.

fluffypillow

Also no updates this week due to lack of time :( I'm planning some theme updates for the next days though.

tekn0

@fluffypillow It seems there are two different screens or values? When I first start the frontend I get the Pegasus loading screen and it finds 900 games and loads the theme.

Then when I start and play a game. After I exit that game (in retropie it's select+start) I get the pegasus logo screen again that stays there for about 6 seconds and says "0 games found" then goes back to the theme.

fluffypillow

@tekn0 Ah I see, yes, the numbers there might be incorrect; that screen is merely waiting for the UI to be ready.

tekn0

@fluffypillow Yeps that's the one. Is there a way to change that screen or make it black by chance? Or, change the text to read "returning to pegasus launcher" or just black it out completely?

I have some custom autostart.sh code I use to remove all of the term text. This keeps the game launching very clean with no rom launch or yellow error text. I was hoping there might be a quick way to null that return screen as well when it shows 0 roms.

fluffypillow

Weekly update!

Fixed games provided by EmulationStation not having launch commands in some cases
Fixed the loading progress bar's width behaving incorrectly
Fixed the loading bar showing "0 games found" when returning from a game (< @tekn0). The loading consists of loading the game list and loading the UI; there is now no text displayed while only the UI is loading, eg. when returning from a game. Ideally the UI loads faster than the game list, but on some systems this can take surprisingly long time (eg. Windows). Will see if this needs more improvements.
Main theme improvements
- The release year and number of players (for multiplayer games) is now displayed
- There is now a placeholder text for collections that have no logo
- There is now a little heart next to favorite games
- Added fade in animations for background and videos
- Fixed game images overlapping each other
- Improved layout calculations, ie. mixed portrait/landscape images should now look better together
- Fixed a bug where the selection got stuck on the very first item, on certain systems with certain gamepads. This will probaly need some additional work in Pegasus itself too, but the situation is now highly improved
Updated the Flixnet heme
- Fixed collections with not too many games getting unaligned
- Fixed missing release years
- Fixed screenshots not getting scaled up on larger resolutions

NeoBi

Hi fluffy ! I wanted to know if is it possible to use ahk scripts to launch games on their emulators ?

fluffypillow

@NeoBi I think it should be possible, yes; according to its docs you might be able to run the script directly, or as a parameter to AutoHotkey.exe, or by converting the script to a standalone exe too.

NeoBi

@fluffypillow Yes it works with standalone exe ! Thank you for your fast awswer. And I love your work, keep it up !

spartan

@fluffypillow is there a way to configure/map controls inside pegasus-frontend (Android) and tell retroarch to use that configuration from pegasus-frontend?

fluffypillow

@spartan This cannot be done automatically on Android because apps are not allowed to change other apps' settings. It may be possible with a custom script however, if RA is set up to load the settings from eg. the SD card then that can be modified with a script, and Pegasus can be set up to call this script on config change.

At least, in theory; haven't tried it yet but I plan to make a similar script for RetroPie in the future, which might also work on Android too.

lilbud

I ran into some trouble with Pegasus.

So I'm trying to import a game, Popful Mail, it has multiple wav files. An ISO and a cue sheet.

I keep all of the Popful Mail files in their own folder for organization purposes. And when I try and edit the metadata file to read the other directory, it won't show any metadata (the media folder is in the root of the rom folder.) It will all show if I move the metadata file and media folder to the popful mail folder, but that wouldn't work if I want to add more games.

Sega CD -> ROMs -> Popful Mail folder, metadata.txt, media folder.

(Sidenote: I wrote this at 1am, and am tired. So if anything needs clarification, lemmie know)

Darksavior

@lilbud Not the answer you're looking for, but why not convert them to .chd? It'll be a single file and be smaller in size. You don't mention what pi you're using, but chd only works with genesis plus gx.

lilbud

@Darksavior I'm actually on PC, and Genesis plus Gx didn't play audio the last time I tried.

It will either play static or no sound at all

Update: My save doesn't work with a CHD file and Genesis Plus GX

lilbud

Figured it out, I have to have a metadata txt file and a media folder in every subfolder for every sega cd game I want to add.

There probably is a better way, but this works for now

PlayingKarrde

@lilbud Have you tried referencing the rom file (in this case the .cue) including the subfolder name in the path? The metadata.txt does support folder paths.

So instead of

file: Popful Mail.cue

it would be:

file: ./<folder name>/Popful Mail.cue

I can't remember if it's forward slash or backslash so try both.

lilbud

@PlayingKarrde I've tried that, but that causes the art and metadata to disappear. The only way to show the art and metadata is the move the both into the "Popful Mail" subfolder. Then add each folder as a rom path within pegasus.

fluffypillow

@lilbud so you have the following structure, right?

roms
+-- metadata.pegasus.txt
+-- popful
    +-- game.cue
    +-- game.iso
    +-- track01.wav
    +-- track02.wav
    ...

In this case, the metadata file would look something like this:

collection: Sega CD
files:
  popful/game.cue
  ...

game: Popful Mail
file: popful/game.cue
description: Some details here

And, because popful/game.cue is under the sudirectory popful, the media files would be looked under media/popful/Popful Mail/, eg. like this:

roms
+-- metadata.pegasus.txt
+-- media
|   +-- popful
|       +-- Popful Mail
|           +-- box_front.png
|           +-- logo.png
|           +-- video.mp4
+-- popful
    +-- game.cue
    +-- game.iso
    +-- track01.wav
    +-- track02.wav

This setup should work fine, but feel free to report it if you run into any troubles.

lilbud

I may have brought it up before (can't really remember), but would it be possible to add support for the how long to beat website as a metadata tag? The site shows how long each game takes to beat, normally and completing everything.

I found this searching around, it is an api wrapper for the site, not sure if it'd be of any help though.

https://github.com/ckatzorke/howlongtobeat

The Python one is a little more up to date: https://github.com/ScrappyCocco/HowLongToBeat-PythonAPI

fluffypillow

@lilbud that's a good idea, I could imagine seeing that at the game details. However getting the metadata for a particular game would have to be handled by a scraper, as that can't be done in Pegasus without guesswork (as games can be present in multiple collections, can have multiple files, etc.). [I wonder if there's someone who'd like to write a modular scraper?]