Announcing Pegasus Frontend

phulshof

Which gstreamer packages did you install so far?

fluffypillow

Week 15:

Qt 5.7 is now supported; in theory Pegasus can be build on Debian 9/Ubuntu 17.04 with the Qt version available from the official repos, except I haven't found the gamepad module yet in any of the Qt packages...
Scripting support (in progress): you can add scripts that will run on quit, before reboot, or before shutdown; on-config-change event is also planned

@phulshof I'm using the good/bad/ugly sets, the plugin-base-dev and omx packages. Apparently building the latest gstreamer and using its ffmpeg plugin improves the quality, at least on Odroid. I wonder if it'd work on the Pi as well.

As for the videos, all of them in the es-matrix-videos repo have issues ("stripes", mostly). Their format is MPEG4 H.263/Simple@L1 profile. However, the videos I've downloaded from ScreenScraper (and haven't touched with Handbrake) use AVC/High@L3.1 profile, and they work perfectly well. So I guess this might be a problem with the plugin that handles H.263-encoded videos.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow will the final Pegasus version support favourites?

It's cool to have every game ever developed for a certain system, but these infinitely long lists are not very inspiring - you'd have to remember which games you love and actively search for them.

I don't understand why EmulationStation doesn't already support favourites, a switch between "favourites mode" and "explore catalog mode" with a buttonclick, as well as a button dedicated for starring and un-starring games for the favourites list, would be fantastic to have. Is this something that can be implemented? I would donate good cash for this functionality.

phulshof

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

As for the videos, all of them in the es-matrix-videos repo have issues ("stripes", mostly). Their format is MPEG4 H.263/Simple@L1 profile. However, the videos I've downloaded from ScreenScraper (and haven't touched with Handbrake) use AVC/High@L3.1 profile, and they work perfectly well. So I guess this might be a problem with the plugin that handles H.263-encoded videos.

All of them? Could you give me a specific example to test? I'll run it on both my Linux PC and my Pi to see if it works for me. I used to have similar display problems with RetroFE, but one of the other programmers fixed it. If it works on RetroFE we could have a look to see what the problem might be.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Yes! Favourites is a planned feature, and the starring button can be done as well. I'd also like to add text search eventually, which would also support a limit-to-favourites kind of option.

@phulshof I've used the es-tolkit-videos for GB and N64, and ScreenScraper videos for NES and SNES. All GB and N64 videos have the same H263 format, and have display problems, and all NES/SNES videos use AVC, but don't have any problems. If I remember correctly, AVC (alias H264) is the format that can be hardware accelerated on the Raspberry Pi (with gst-omx), which is why it has no issues, I guess.

fluffypillow

PS. I'll be away for a few days, excuse me for late replies.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow Faaantastic! I can't wait. Enjoy the time off (if that's the case, anyways).

phulshof

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@phulshof I've used the es-tolkit-videos for GB and N64, and ScreenScraper videos for NES and SNES. All GB and N64 videos have the same H263 format, and have display problems, and all NES/SNES videos use AVC, but don't have any problems. If I remember correctly, AVC (alias H264) is the format that can be hardware accelerated on the Raspberry Pi (with gst-omx), which is why it has no issues, I guess.

I just tried AeroFighters Assault (USA) for the N64 on my Linux PC; that part works fine. I'll try to find some time tonight to set up my pi, and test it there as well. I'll keep you posted.

phulshof

I just checked on my pi as well: no issues there either (though the videos are far from great quality to be honest; the ones from EmuMovies are miles ahead). So, we're down to two possibilities:

I installed a gstreamer (codec?) library that you did not.
RetroFE uses gstreamer differently from your code.
Could you give me the output of the following command?
apt list --installed | egrep "gstreamer|libav"

fluffypillow

@phulshof Yeah the videos work fine on desktop, I've only noticed problems on the Raspberry so far. The Qt framework isn't perfect either, so yes, there could be a bug in the Multimedia module as well. Here's the output of the command on my Pi 3: https://pastebin.com/71tQiQ0y.

( By the way, those are test videos for ES theme development, which is why their quality is so low. )

Kqpout

@fluffypillow Thanks for your work !

Alas, the windows builds you provided don't seem to work on my W10 (neither does anything)
Will try building with latest sources tomorrow.
(we need this on windows as a successor to ES)

Darksavior

If anyone was wondering, you can scrape the wheel (logo) pictures with universal xml scraper. Make sure it keeps them as png or they won't be transparent. For some reason it won't scrape some game's logos despite there being one on the ss site.

The names aren't the same, of course. In a windows command prompt you can just do rename *-image.png *-logo.png

fluffypillow

@Kqpout I've just tested it on a friend's Win10, worked fine (in the sense that it produced a black screen and empty systems bar, since he didn't have any emulators or ES installed). What kind of problem you get, does it fail to launch?

Also you can get the latest automatic Windows build from here (choose the flavor=mingw row, then select the ARTIFACTS tab). The builds aren't on the GitHub releases page yet because they run on a different site; hope I can fix this eventually.

Kqpout

@fluffypillow Yes, it just does nothing, no error, no window, the process just close after one or two seconds. Launching from a cmd window show nothing.
It's the same with the latest build, even as administrator or with compatibility.
Win10 64 bits, 14393.1358

Kqpout

So I tried to compile it! And saw the error!

"Found C:/Users/pophi/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
Required parameter <extension> is missing or empty in a <system> node"

And indeed one of my systems didn't have <extension>.

Now it works :)

But maybe it should run anyway or display an error message ?

fluffypillow

Yeah, error reporting on the UI is not yet done :)

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Will we be allowed to resize the boxart rows in the future? I believe that will fix the look of the arcade sections using flyers for boxart. 3 rows should make the flyers legible.

fluffypillow

@Darksavior at the moment the number of items per row is fixed (in the theme), with "hardcoded" overrides for certain systems. I certainly want to change that, but not sure what'd be the best way for that.

fluffypillow

Week 17:

external scripting support has landed
- documentation available in the wiki
a bunch of documentation fixes and source code improvements
- added links to the latest Linux/Windows builds in the README
- better organization of the files in the Windows package
- developers: added a list of packages and PPAs you can use on (desktop) Ubuntu to the Build guide to easily build Pegasus (no need to compile or install Qt manually)
created a RetroPie script, on review at the moment

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Bug in pegasus-fe_alpha2-47-g3fee22f_rpi2-static.zip.
If you scroll down your games, eventually they'll all disappear. Then it's unusable. Can't even see the text either. The last build I tried was #31 i think..