Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fastpop72

@fluffypillow Thanks for your frontend!

I have a question: I always used Pegasus on my bartop environment running Debian and i have any flaws.

Recently i began to install a new environment under Windows 10 and i noticed the performance of Pegasus are very poor.
It takes a lot to check the roms at start, when i scroll down the games i have a lot of lags (compared to Debian setup, same roms). The machine running Windows it's a new Ryzen 5 + Vega 11 and a NvME SSD.

Could be the theme i use? (GameOS)

Thanks...

fluffypillow

@fastpop72 Hi, well file operations are in general slower on Windows, as far as I know (se eg. here) it's mainly related to the file system (NTFS). It might be possible to improve the speed with some smart caching in the future; for now you could try disabling the third party sources you don't use, or use smaller images (so they load faster).

fluffypillow

General update! 2021-05-04

I've got a few short term project that piled up, so development is going a bit slower than usual; sorry about that! On the other hand, I haven't received new major bug reports about the latest versions, so I'll nominate them to Alpha 15! You can read a list of all changes since 14 here: https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend/releases/tag/alpha15.

There are also two very minor updates since the last weekly update:

Android: Updated the app icon to support adaptive launchers
LaunchBox: Added support for game sort names

There's also an important notice if you're updating from stable: Windows shortcuts and Linux symlinks weren't properly resolved everywhere before; if you have games like that as favorite, you might notice some of them no longer marked as such. If necessary, you can edit the list of favorites manually, they are listed in a text file called favorites.txt in your config directory (see https://pegasus-frontend.org/docs/user-guide/config-dirs/).

Linux news: The APT repository site, where the Debian package is hosted, closes down this summer; in case you're interested in maintaining one, feel free to drop by in this issue: https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend/issues/202. As for Flatpak, the update will be out in about half an hour.

fastpop72

@fluffypillow Hello, how can i compile Pegasus in order to have a single executable like the continuos builds?

I forked the source and set appveyor to autobuild but it creates an executable together with all the required dlls, but doing so i can run pegasus-fe.exe only from the folder itself and not from everywhere like your single executable.

Can i have some hints?

Thanks.

fluffypillow

@fastpop72 Hi, the Appveyor build is there to make sure Visual Studio doesn't detect any errors either. I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with it to create single-exe files though, the Windows builds are cross compiled from Linux, where this is more straightforward.

fastpop72

Someone has succesfully compiled Pegasus with the provided infos on the site? I followed every step but QTCreator gives me errors.... Is the compiling instructions obsolete?

Someone could post a step-by-step compiling guide?

Thanks.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I recently updated to the 06/06/2021 alpha15-12-ge75b593b-dirty build and been having odd problems with my inputs. On a clean boot with snes pad and 360 stick connected: snes pad works fine. 360 is responsive for around one second, and then it'll place itself to the game on the upper left forever. This affects the snes pad until I disconnect the 360 controller. The side menu screen is not affected. I don't remember the previous build that I had but the stick worked fine with that.

No problems with emulationstation or once I'm in a game. Testing the stick with jstest seems to be fine.

Retropie 4.7.15, pi4 with latest stable kernel 5.10.17-v71

fluffypillow

@darksavior This sounds like it might be related to SDL2's gamepad handling, which was updated in the recent releases. Could you also try the stable release? In case you've changed the layout from inside Pegasus, there should be an sdl_controllers.txt file in the config directory; try removing it temporarily and set the buttons with the latest version.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I did not find sdl_controllers.txt in /retropie/configs/all/pegasus-fe. I tried alpha15-dirty 2021-03-28 and everything works good.

fluffypillow

@darksavior Could you try setting the gamepad layout again in the latest Pegasus, even if the buttons seem to be fine?

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Some buttons decided to bind themselves to other buttons or not at all. I binded them to the right buttons and pegasus has decided to now create that sdl txt file. Everything's working well now, thanks.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Today I connected a new controller and I'm having troubles. It's an innext snes pad. Pegasus sees it as a "retrolink snes controller". Setting certain buttons will make pegasus freeze for a bit like the A button. I had to use a text editor to properly set the A button.
Some of the dpad directions are having the same freezing issue. I'm not sure how to set the dpad. Right now, up and left are not responding, right responds as left, and down works.

I've had to delete the sdl txt file entry and reboot my pi a few times because I'm not sure how to "clear" a setting so it has been time consuming with trial and errors.

03000000790000001100000010010000,Retrolink SNES Controller,a:b1,b:b2,back:b8,dpdown:a1,dpleft:a0,dpright:a0,dpup:a1,leftshoulder:b4,rightshoulder:b5,start:b9,x:b0,y:b3,platform:Linux,

Troopaking

@fluffypillow hello .
I feel like Pegasus is under valued i love it . Be amazing to see a standalone os for it instead of thru retropie . Have you considered this before ?

fluffypillow

@troopaking Nah, while it would be nice, I don't really have the time to manage and maintain a separate distribution. You can make one however, if you'd like to.

fluffypillow

@baksbani I guess it might work? Might need to build it manually though.

fluffypillow

It's been a while since the last update, so here's a recap of what happened the summer:

Added Android 11 support
- While this has been made to be backward-compatible as possible on Pegasus' side, but due to Android restrictions, some apps may no longer support opening files directly, or support it differently on Android 11. You might wish to contact the app developers in this case.
Added Playnite support (thanks polson!)
Added Lithuanian translation (thanks mrqside!)
Updated Russian translation (thanks mrqside!)
Linux: Fixed shutdown/reboot/suspend support in Flatpak (thanks j8r!)
Mac: Added support for the portable.txt file on this platform too
Steam: Improved support for custom game library locations
Steam: Updated the list of ignored entries (ie. Proton and runtimes)
LaunchBox: Fixed rating values going over 100%
LaunchBox: Fixed imported Steam games not launching correctly in some cases (thanks polson!)
LaunchBox: Fixed the favorite support for Steam games (thanks polson!)
Metadata: Added experimental support for URI values as files, which can be used to customize games found by third-party sources (eg. steam:12345, lutris:some-slug, etc.)
Updated the gamepad database
Themes API: Fixed support for JSON objects with memory

Technical:

It is now possible to build Pegasus using CMake; you can find the details in the documentation (https://pegasus-frontend.org/docs/dev/build/)
Updated SDL to 2.0.16

fluffypillow

New update! 2021-09-26

Redesigned the gamepad layout editor
You can now disable checking the existence of game files (useful for large game sets)
Improved loading bar
Added Japanese translation (thanks waitingmoon!)
Steam: Updated support for the recent client changes
Theme API: You can now use Qt.labs.qmlmodels (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtqml-models-qmlmodule.html)
Theme API: Updated SortFilterProxyModel to the latest version

justindu

@fluffypillow Is it possible to run pegasus within the X11 desktop environment on a RPi4?

I installed the experimental packages within retropie_setup.sh, and tried to launch from terminal, and after a long scroll of text, the terminal window hangs, and no UI launches. - FYI - emulationstation and all the games are working, just not Pegasus. I'm looking for the ability to navigate and exit with a mouse/touchescreen, which emulationstation does not seem to do.

Darksavior

Setting a custom resolution for pegasus with a json file is no longer working. This is a new retropie install fully updated with the latest 12/16/2021 build of pegasus. At least pegasus uses the custom 1440p resolution that I set for my pi.
I changed to the kms driver and that fixed everything along with the ability to set other resolutions. I'll keep the rest if you're curious.

egl.json contents:

{
  "outputs": [
    {
      "name": "HDMI1",
      "mode": "1920x1080"
    }
  ]
}

autostart.sh contents:

QT_QPA_EGLFS_KMS_CONFIG=/home/pi/egl.json pegasus-fe

Verbose log:
https://pastebin.com/ZLbdLQWQ~~

fluffypillow

@darksavior Hm, wasn't KMS the default on the Pi 4? Or were there some driver changes recently? I can mention it in the docs if that's the case.