Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@AndersHP thanks for the screenshots! Turns out there was a bug in handling the <path> tag in Pegasus, and so the absolute and $HOME-relative paths didn't match the actual games. Just pushed up the fix, should work fine now in the latest version (alpha4-2).

fluffypillow

Also a summary of the asset loading, to make it hopefully less confusing.

Pegasus is searching for assets in two places:

[rom directory]/media/, where the role of the files (eg. "game logo") is indicated by the suffix (eg. -logo). If a file has no suffix (that is, simply [romname].png/jpg), it is assumed to be the front box art (or the video for video files). -image is not a recognized suffix (I find it somewhat redundant calling an image file "image"), but you can replace it with whatever you want with any batch renamer tool or the linux rename program (see @Darksavior's nice guide ~10 posts earlier for scraping tips).
if there are no matching files in the media directory, then the <image>, <video>, and <marquee> tags of the ES2 gamelist are also checked (again, <image> is used as the box art). No other/custom tags are checked for assets, and downloaded_images is not scanned either.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@AndersHP Just pushed up the fix, should work fine now in the latest version (alpha4-2).

Booya! This totally did the trick! Awesome work.
Although I still cannot get logos to show, unless I copy them to the media folder and rename -marquee to -logo.. Another bug, or should I scrape like @Darksavior does?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP no, that's normal, the default theme uses the -logo files for logos only. You can rename the files and replace -marquee with -logo in the gamelists, to make it work with both Pegasus and ES.

fluffypillow

No big changes this week due to lack of time. I've fixed the ES2 XML parsing bug (above), and also updated the translation files.

AndersHP

Got an excellent Pegasus setup, after running Universal XML Scraper with boxart, "wheel" art and videos. Only thing I had to do, was to rename -marquee images as @fluffypillow mentioned above, and in the same manner rename -marquee references in the gamelists. I used Bulk Rename Utility in the downloaded_images folder and Notepad C++ replace function to do this. Pegasus looks excellent.

A few bugs:

A few times I have encountered an issue with portrait-boxart previews to suddenly looking square, cutting off the bottom of all images.
One time I have had Pegasus quit to terminal after I exited a game. Had to do a hard reset. Error message on the screen was "Segmentation fault".
When exiting Pegasus I have 10-20 error messages saying something like "No volume control". Forgive me as I forget the words exactly.

A few requests:

~~I'd love for Pegasus to support "page up/down". It takes a long time to scroll in large Collections of games. Maybe a way to scroll through letters also (without having a keyboard attached).~~ Already on the Github, sorry.
~~I love the easy way to filter by favorites, but cannot get around to adding games as favorites. Perhaps this could be done with a buttonpress?~~ Already on the Github, sorry.
In the more "nice to have" department, I'd like the code to be hidden upon launching a game. In ES it jumps from frontend to launching image directly to the game (and back when exiting). That makes the experience more seamless.

Apart from this, I think I'm about to change my bootup sequence to Pegasus permanently. It's just great! Good Work!

fluffypillow

Sorry, no updates this week either (job/other projects). I'll likely have some more time next week though!

COOL_IRON

Looks awesome

AndersHP

After a long day of scraping yesterday (6-7 hours nonstop) I got the temperature warning in upper right corner as I wanted to test the results.

I'm running with video previews but never had the problem before now. Anyone with videopreviews experienced this heat issue in Pegasus?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP so far I've only seen that when I tried playing H264 videos on a Pi Zero (poor Pi got quite hot). What kind of device are you using?

Rion

@fluffypillow Is Pegasus using vlc or omx player for video snaps?

fluffypillow

@Rion it uses GStreamer, which in turn can use OMX, but unfortunately that tends to broke the non-hardware accelerated videos. See https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/100120.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow I have a new model 3B, RetroPie 4.3.
Will have to test some more...

AndersHP

Having just finished scraping all my systems, I find the black background too black :)
Is there a way to add e.g. one of Tronkyfran's system backgrounds per system, or does it only support the -screenshot asset per rom?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP no support for that yet, but it's a good idea! There could be even support for all kind of system-specific assets, like a default box art (eg. cartridge) or background music.

tronkyfran

@fluffypillow That and a little theme making tutorial would be my perfect Christmas gift😉😉

AndersHP

@tronkyfran In light of your ES theme, I cannot wait to see your Pegasus theme. So add that to my christmas-list also!

fluffypillow

Aand here's the weekly changelog:

a bunch of very minor optimizations and internal changes (probably unnoticeable)
player count ranges (eg. 1-4) in ES2's <player> tag are now properly supported (just noticed this wasn't working)
experimenting with Steam support: while I can list the installed games, the descriptions and assets would need to be fetched from the web, which will need some further work
experimenting with a new loading screen: it will show the number of games loaded so far; I plan to close the logo thread this month, and this loading screen will be added after that

lilbud

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

experimenting with Steam support: while I can list the installed games, the descriptions and assets would need to be fetched from the web, which will need some further work

Try having Pegasus search for the 'app manifest' files in the Steam Directory. They list the Game name and ID which is used by steam to list info.

fluffypillow

@lilbud Yes, that's the part that works, what's missing is getting additional metadata and assets. They seem to have a nice web interface though, so hopefully it won't be too difficult.