Announcing Pegasus Frontend

AndersHP

Just to update my little benchmarking from earlier:
When having artwork for 5000 games on USB2.0: Pegasus boots in 1 minut 27 secs.
When having artwork on microSD (class 10): Pegasus boots in 23 secs.

Quite a performance difference. Probably the quality of the USB stick to blame.

It would be cool to test a new USB3.1 drive, but haven't got any so will probably leave the artwork on the microSD from now on.

fluffypillow

@meaning I can't seem to find documentation about LaunchBox config files, but if it's in a usable format, then yeah, it shouldn't be impossible to add support.

@halfmanhalfcake Not yet, that's one of the things I plan to work on next (and also adding documentation for it).

@AndersHP Now that the docs are online, I can also start working on speed optimizations. I have some chinese sticks around, perfect for testing.

mitu

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

I have some chinese sticks around

For a moment there, I was trying to imagine how you could use some chopsticks to improve the speed of your program :).

meaning

@fluffypillow : dope!
Are you guys hanging somewhere on irc ? i'd like to join if you do. This project is really promising.

tronkyfran

The documentation and tutorials are AWESOME. Thanks a lot for your work.

Newellj79

I installed thru retro pie experimental packages but can’t figure how to launch on raspberry pi. Please help!

AndersHP

@newellj79 said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

I installed thru retro pie experimental packages but can’t figure how to launch on raspberry pi. Please help!

Hehe. @fluffypillow you need to write this in the first post of this thread. @Newellj79 Right here :)

Darksavior

@fluffypillow Will you make the default theme an ini to edit so we can change layout/columns, etc?

fluffypillow

@AndersHP @Newellj79 Yeah someone (me?) should really make a frontend chooser dialog. I've just updated the first post with the launching info, thanks.

@Darksavior still on my to do list, sorry -- I'd like to add it by implementing theme specific options, which could then be changed in a settings menu.

@meaning I tend to hang out in the #retropie channel on afternoons (GMT+2).

PS. We're over 500 posts now, wow!

tronkyfran

So, testing this I realized that we can make a system selection screen with video backgrounds, at least on Windows ( performance hit on Pi could be Big, suppose). OMG.

herb_fargus

@tronkyfran I imagine it could replicate most of launchbox's functionality eg coverflow etc.

tronkyfran

@herb_fargus As far as I know, the limit is the computer performance, really really excited about this, I'm testing this since fluffypillow released the tutorials and will probably make a tronkyfran's theme adaptation for this to train a bit myself on qml before going to my oldroom-like theme.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow I tried daphne today and the games won't show in pegasus. I don't even see the daphne gamelist xml being processed when pegasus is loading. Daphne is viewable in ES. Any ideas?

Alturis

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

[directory of the rom]/media/

Could it also check [directory of the rom]/images/ for those of us who have been using Steven Selphs scraper with the option to put media in the roms folder under "images" ?

fluffypillow

@darksavior Interesting, could you check the es_systems.cfg that the Daphne rom directory is indeed there, and the gamelist.xml is either in that folder, or under ~/.emulationstation/gamelists/daphne/gamelist.xml? If everything seems to be in place, please upload the systems and gamelist file somewhere and I'll check them. Did this work in earlier versions?

@Alturis You can create a symlink (an "alias" for the folder) with the name media, pointing to your images directory. Here's how:

cd ROM_DIRECTORY
ln -s images media

If you now open the media dir, you'll see the contents of images, and Pegasus should be able to access them too.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow
Everything's in~/.emulationstation/gamelists/ . ES has no issues with daphne. I never tried daphne before so I can't say if it worked in pegasus in the past. I'm using stretch if it matters. https://www.dropbox.com/s/f2yval4afi79rfp/gamelist.xml?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yajohaz7homa118/es_systems.cfg?dl=0

Pegasus doesn't even see daphne's gamelist.xml :

fluffypillow

@Darksavior Ah I see, Daphne is that emulator that stores games in directories, right? Pegasus probably didn't find any files with .daphne extension, so it skipped processing the gamelist XML. I can add directory search support, in case this caused the issue.

Alturis

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

You can create a symlink (an "alias" for the folder) with the name media, pointing to your images directory.

Ah. Good tip. Linux/Unix is not my first language. ;)

Will have to think in those terms moving forward.

shantigilbert

@fluffypillow amazing work, been following since the beginning and I managed to compile it for the Amlogic S905 using LibreElec, had some problems with QT but finally got 5.9.1 to compile. I am trying to switch from ES to Pegasus, I know its still in early development but I am amazed and how fast it loads vs ES (ES takes about 5 or more minutes with all my roms, vs less than 1 minute for Pegasus) and how well it runs on the s905, besides other bugs that ES seems to have on my build, but that's not for this thread.

Anyways I have 3 small questions I could not really find the answer to (or maybe I didn't search that well), hope I won't bother you to much with them.

~~I see you can run scripts after events, like quit or so, are these scripts regular .sh scripts?~~ yes they are :) but there is no option to run them at start?
I currently have a lot of ROMS with all the meta data and images for ES, Pegasus loads them up correctly, but it shows the box art as the thumbnail and the video as preview, Is there a way without changing/deleting other images to select what is shown instead of the box art? or does it depend on the theme?
~~I see there is a way to select "Favorites" but I could not find how to mark a game as favorite, is this still not implemented?~~

Edit: I see the mark as favorite is not yet implemented, but can be added manually.

fluffypillow

@shantigilbert Thanks, good to hear it works for you too! Feel free to report if you get any issues on the S905. As for the questions,

Pegasus will try to run any executable files it finds, be it shell script, a program or eg. python code (just mark them executable with chmod +x filename). There's no on-start script, as you usually want such startup script to fully finish before a program starts (eg. preparing the file system, setting up network sockets, etc.). You can always just write a launch/wrapper script for this task.
Yes, that depends on the theme (but theme makers can add support for changing what's displayed).
Yeah, marking as favorite is not yet implemented, but if it's marked as one in ES2's gamelist, it will be recognized.