Announcing Pegasus Frontend

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.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Yeah, I'm renaming my images in windows since I also scrape on that.

Crashes and freezes galore:) Looks amazing, though. A small taste of what it'll be. I know this is an alpha so I'll try not to post at github about these issues so early in dev.

Scrolling with videos causes the freezes. Some videos are distorted.
The systems without videos seems to be fine. I'm using sselph's scraper in windows with handbrakecli.exe to auto downsize them for the pi. I won't use videos for now.

Loading a game is another adventure. It'll randomly boot me back to pegasus after 15+ seconds. Then, if I go load the game again, it takes me back to where I was in the game. Crashes with exit code 15.

I also need to use my kb since pegasus sees my snes pad's dpad as analog. The dpad won't respond. I'm sure once the ability to change controls is implemented, this will no longer be a problem.

I added some systems myself, but not sure how to do add the logos for those. The retropie system page has no icons.

Darksavior

@sselph Sorry to bother, but is your scraper working to get logo art from screenscraper.fr? Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I can only get the logos from gdb, but they're not transparent like ss's. SS does have three different kinds of logos, so maybe I thought I'd need to type some more strings.

In windows, I tried scraper.exe -console_src ss -console_img l

fluffypillow

New sunday, new changelog; here's what happened on week 13:

Fixed the game launching bug
Some mouse navigation fixes
Implemented scrolling details text: https://my.mixtape.moe/iwggya.webm
Added initial multilanguage support:
- Added Hungarian translation as an example of a fairly usual European language
- Added Rovás (traditional Hungarian) as an example for a right-to-left, non-latin-alphabet-using translation
- Multilanguage support is still work in progress; I'm working on the settings menu where you'll be able to change the language (it will default to the OS one)

screenshot

lilbud

@fluffypillow said

https://my.mixtape.moe/iwggya.webm

Nice try, but I'm not listening to your mixtape :)

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I must've spent the whole weekend trying to build this and still nowhere close. I've also never compiled in my life so it's quite the learning experience. Trying with Ubuntu, I'm following the pi cross compile tutorial you linked in your wiki with your configure settings. Qt creator doesn't seem to see qml, multimedia, quick, svg. It also says my qmake is "non-installed -prefix build - for internal development only"
I'm using these 5.9 gits from http://code.qt.io/cgit/qt
Installed qt5, qtdeclarative, qtgamepad, qtmultimedia, qtbase, qtsvg, few more I can't remember.

If I use the main package from https://launchpad.net/~beineri/+archive/ubuntu/opt-qt59-xenial then qtcreator wont complain but it won't create a working build. Pi refuses to run it.
I'll keep trying.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior yeah Qt can be quite complex, and not necessarily the best first time experience :) I've never seen that error before, but you could try using this Qt build I've made. I'll also set up an automated nightly build system tomorrow, so you won't have to rebuild every time there's a change.

(Also the PPA you linked provides desktop Qt, which is why it will not run on the Pi.)

fluffypillow

Ok, the very latest builds are now available here, and are updated on every new commit of the master branch.

AndersHP

Could it be possible for Pegasus to have an overlay-option for some games, or will overlays work the way it does today?

In non-coder terms, what's the current status of this project?