Announcing Pegasus Frontend

[itskryode]

well, not dead, but RetroPie is going to because 1. We've got Pegasus. 2. PEGASUS

[CodeDrawer]

So how do I put pony on my retropie?

[itskryode]

You're gonna have to ask @fluffypillow for that cause I know nothing about that.

[CodeDrawer]

OK.

[meleu]

@itsnitro said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Emulation Station is dead.

I've never see EmulationStation more active then it has being lately.

Why are you saying that?

[lilbud]

@meleu Probably because Pegasus will crush ES in terms of performance, support, features, etc.

[meleu]

@lilbud "probably", "will"... I'm very excited about pegasus too, but it's very early to say that ES is dead.

[CodeDrawer]

I want flying space pony! :-D

[fluffypillow]

Okay, here it is, release alpha2! I'd like to stress that this is an alpha version, it's INCOMPLETE, some features are missing, while others may not work at all. It's here only for those "early adopter" kind of people who want to experiment with integrating it into their setup. This is not for general use yet.

Rasperry Pi

Downloads: Pi 1/0, Pi 2/3

Just extract the ZIP somewhere and run the file (recommended install location: /opt/pegasus-frontend/). The data files and most used libraries are build into the binary.

Requirements:

• tested on Debian Jessie
• SDL2 (libsdl2-2.0-0) (preinstalled on RetroPie, but probably not on regular Debian)
• libinput (libinput10)
• for video playback, you'll also need gstreamer1.0-alsa, probably gstreamer1.0-omx, and depending on the media format of your videos, one or more of the plugin packages: gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly (for me, bad worked well for my H264 encoded videos, but I've installed all of them just in case)
• Pegasus requires at least 128 MB VRAM, but 256 MB is recommended

Known issues:

• Sometimes video playback may freeze the program
• PS3 controllers may not work without xboxdrv (running sudo xboxdrv --detach-kernel-driver --mimic-xpad -s before should fix it; this is a Qt issue)
• Launching games does not work correctly, because Pegasus has some problems with runcommand. I'll start debugging this the next week.

Desktop Linux (X11)

Download: 64-bit Linux/X11

Extract and run, just like on the Pi.

Requirements:

• a Linux distro from the past 3 years (in practice, Ubuntu 14.04 or later)
• SDL2 (libsdl2-2.0-0)
• GStreamer is usually preinstalled on many distros, but in case it isn't, follow the Pi guide above (except gstreamer1.0-omx)

Windows

There are two Windows releases, one was built using Visual Studio (MSVC), and the other using the open source GCC toolchain (MinGW). In theory, there should be no performance difference, but I haven't tested them throughly.

Download: MinGW, MSVC

Extract the ZIP somewhere, and run pegasus-fe.exe. If you're using the MSVC version on an older Windows, and get missing MSVCxxx DLLs, install the included vcredist.exe.

Requirements:

• tested on Windows 7, but it may work even on XP, and someone confirmed running it on 10
• it should "just work"

[fluffypillow]

Also in before the thread turns into a flame war, as someone who also worked on ES2 (for a very short time), I do respect the work of you guys. There haven't been much progress on it for years before, so it's nice to see it getting some activity and even new features.

[fluffypillow]

Ps. the issue/feature tracker is here: https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend/issues, feel free to report issues here or there.

[jdrassa]

@fluffypillow as someone who has been contributing to ES2 lately, personally I am very excited for Pegasus. I plan to try it out soon and whenever you are ready for some contributions, I will be happy to help.

[Darksavior]

@fluffypillow I can't run it. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. It can't find libinput.so.10. How do I install that? I installed the gstreamer packages.
It's a fresh install of retropie 4.2. I can't update it because it breaks my pad's driver.

[fluffypillow]

@Darksavior ah, you'll also need to install libinput10. Sorry about that, I'll update the post above. There should be no other required libs, I've just tried it on a fresh RetroPie 4.2 image too.

[Darksavior]

@fluffypillow No worries. I know there's a ton that needs to be written, but where is pegasus looking for the game pictures? I load my games from usb, and pegasus sees the games, but no pictures. Games are in /media/usb0/, and pictures in /media/usb0/system folder/images/ and ES uses them.

Also, my snes pad is seen as analog, and I can't bind buttons. Is it possible in this build?

[sselph]

@Darksavior It looks in ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/system and uses the suffix of the image to determine its type https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend/blob/master/src/backend/Assets.cpp#L21

[Darksavior]

@sselph Ah ok, is your scraper going to be updated to support pegasus's naming scheme?

[sselph]

@Darksavior looking at the code it doesn't look like the default -image suffix that my code and ES uses works. If you remove the suffix it may work.

FYI I haven't actually used the code just inspecting the code to figure out how I could integrate with it.

[Darksavior]

@sselph Thanks again. I'll have to wait when you decide to change your scraper's naming scheme to be compatible. Lots of renaming if I do it manually, heh. -boxFront is for the cart, -screenshot for the left half of the screen(I used the cart pic again). -video works without renaming, yay.

Update: duh, I forgot my old dos renaming skills. That was easy...

[fluffypillow]

@Darksavior @sselph yes Pegasus looks for files with certain suffixes for the different asset types, see https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/9598/announcing-pegasus-frontend/52. At the moment the ones @sselph linked are supported, but suggestions are welcome. I can add -image too, but as most of the assets are also images, it didn't feel too informative to me :)

There are tools for batch renaming files, for example you can run rename 's/-image.jpg/.jpg/' * in the image directory.